1956 Top Ten: Moonlight Gambler (#10)

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This will look suspiciously like my 100 favorites list as we go through the top ten. It wasn’t until I started making the 1956 list that I realized how many of my 100 favorites came from that year. Great year for music, and I wasn’t even born! Let’s get it going with a classic tune from 70 years ago. #10: Moonlight Gambler - Frankie Laine What a song. Obviously. As I said, it’s on my 100 favorites list. I also used it on my moon countdown. We had a greatest hits album of Frankie Laine’s when I was a kid, and I can’t tell you any other song that was on it. This was the first song on side two, and that was the side I played…then didn’t listen to the rest of the album (like most people with albums: listen to the hit, ignore everything else). And, since Mel Brooks has finished shooting a sequel to Spaceballs, I’ll retell that great story about how Brooks put an ad in a trade paper for a “Frankie Laine-type singer” to sing the theme to Blazing Saddles. Who’d he get but Frankie Laine himself! Laine had no idea the movie was a spoof of westerns, so he put his heart and soul into singing the theme. Laine just had that kind of voice. Moonlight Gambler Written by Bob Hilliard and Phil Springer Recorded by Frankie Laine Released as a single, 1956 You can gamble for matchsticks: