#47 -- "Melissa" by the Allman Brothers ... Click Here
This is an iconic mellow classic from one of the bands that put "Southern Rock" on the map. It's a staple of every trucker who has ever driven a rig across this great country, and can still be found on those little diner booth jukeboxes in roadside diners even decades after it was released.
Here's Gregg Allman himself from a 2006 interview:
I wrote that song in 1967 in a place called the Evergreen Hotel in Pensacola, Florida. By that time I got so sick of playing other people's material that I just sat down and said, "OK, here we go. One, two, three -- we're going to try to write songs." And about 200 songs later -- much garbage to take out -- I wrote this song called "Melissa." And I had everything but the title. I thought (referring to lyrics): "But back home, we always run ... to sweet Barbara" -- no. Diane...? "We always run ... to sweet Bertha." No, so I just kind of put it away for a while.
So one night I was in the grocery store -- it was my turn to go get the tea, the coffee, the sugar and all that other sh!t ... and there was this Spanish lady there and she had this little toddler with her -- this little girl. And I'm sitting there, getting a few things and what have you. And this little girl takes off, running down the aisle. And the lady yells, "Oh, Melissa! Melissa, come back, Melissa!" And I went, "Oh - that's it." I forgot about half the stuff I went for, I went back home and, man, it was finished, only I couldn't really tell if it was worth a damn or not because I'd written so many bad ones.
And there you have it, folks!
Ping!
#50 -- "Sara" by Fleetwood Mac
#49 -- "Ventura Highway" by America
#48 -- "Run" by George Strait
#47 -- "Melissa" by the Allman Brothers
I quit iTunes years ago. Maybe they fixed the issue but in the older versions if you copied your MP3 files over to another machine or sync’d it with another device, it would create a duplicate. Later versions they added a checkbox hidden deep in one of the menus to prevent that but it was already too late. Drove me absolutely mad. I even bought some software to try to remove duplicates but took forever, and difficult to tell (at the time) if they were 2 different recordings of the same song (e.g. a live version and a studio version from the same album).
I spent a fortune on CDs way back in the day, and then weeks burning them to MP3 only to have iTunes mess it up entirely.
Now, I just pay Spotify. Completely turned me off to iTunes.
A bit of trivia:
That song was actually written but never released while
Duane and Greg were in a band called “The 31st of February”,
a few years before they formed “The Allman Brothers Band”.
Before all of that, they performed as “The Allman Joys”.
That’s a great story by Greg Allman.
I was on the University of Missouri’s Concert Committee long ago. We had the Allman Brothers perform at the old Brewer Fieldhouse around 1970. I picked up some of the band members at the regional Columbia / Jefferson City airport and brought them to their hotel. For the life of me, I don’t remember who I had in the car. All I remember is they were dog-tired and wanted to be left alone.
I was not that much into "southern rock" until Molly Hatchet hit it big in 1980 with "Flirtin' With Disaster". I then went down the rabbit hole of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Outlaws, Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, Little Feat, etc. Lot of good nuggets to be found there.
My #47 most played iTunes song is "The Lights And Buzz" by Jack's Mannequin. I play this one a lot around Christmas time. It's not a Christmas song per se but it definitely gives me the feel of Christmas.
It's not a well known song and I think many here will really like it. This song was written by Andrew McMahon, probably better known for the band Something Corporate, just after getting a stem cell transplant to treat his leukemia (that he fully recovered from).
I haven’t downloaded many songs from ITunes. I get most of my digital music from Youtube and convert it to mp3 using a youtube-to-mp3 converter or Audacity. Then I place the songs into folders arranged in chronological order (1950, 1951, etc.). These are then loaded onto flash drives so I can listen to them in my car.
I currently have two music flash drives, one for the 1950’s and the other for the ‘60’s. I plan to eventually do the same for the ‘20’s, ‘30’s and ‘40’s.