Ten NOT One-Hit Wonder Acts You Think ARE: Burton Cummings (#6)

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With every one-hit wonder list comes the inevitable question: "why didn't you include so-and-so?" And the inevitable answer is one of two things: "I forgot them;" or, in this case, "they had other hits." Here's another act who actually had more than one hit. #6: Burton Cummings Timothy Schmit, the bassist for the Eagles who sang lead on their much-loved song "I Can't Tell You Why" is, as a solo artist, a one-hit wonder. His only top 40 hit is "Boys Night Out." Yet it's hard to think of him as a "one-hit wonder" because of his work with the Eagles. To some degree that's true of Burton Cummings, too. The lead singer and piano player for the Guess Who (aw, go on, guess who!! ), Cummings had a successful career in that band. When they broke up (with guitarist Randy Bachman forming Bachman-Turner Overdrive) Cummings recorded a solo album in 1977. It yielded the massive hit "Stand Tall." While Cummings gets airplay in his home land, and in fact is in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as a solo artist as well as with the Guess Who, it's usually only "Stand Tall" that gets the US airplay. But there was another top 40 hit. In 1981, "You Saved My Soul" hit #37 on the Billboard hot 100. Coming four years after the big hit, and after a massive shift or two in popular music trends in the US, it was pretty much ignored. And, as so many others' follow-up songs, that's really sad because the follow-up is quite good. But, as the title of one of Cummings' solo albums said, he's got his own way to rock. Here's the 1981 minor hit by Burton Cummings that everyone forgot (except his fans and the people who liked it enough to get it to the top 40):