Without the black keys, the white keys on a piano would pretty much be stuck playing \u201cTwinkle, Twinkle, Little Star\u201d and \u201cDo Re Mi.\u201d\u00a0 If you want anything more interesting than that\u2014if you want a song like \u201cYesterday,\u201d for instance\u2014you\u2019re going to have to get the two sets of keys working together. From this little insight, Paul McCartney crafted the biggest hit record of his post-Beatles career: \u201cEbony And Ivory.\u201d Recorded as a duet with the great Stevie Wonder, \u201cEbony And Ivory\u201d took the top spot in the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1982 and didn\u2019t relinquish it until seven weeks later.<\/p>\n
McCartney had been a fan of Stevie Wonder\u2019s for many years before they first met. He even included a Braille message for Stevie\u2014\u201dWe love you\u201d\u2014on the back of his 1973 Wings album Red Rose Speedway. Wonder spent the 1970s recording a string of incredible albums that often included songs expressing a strong social consciousness. It\u2019s not surprising, then, that McCartney thought of Stevie Wonder as a duet partner for \u201cEbony And Ivory.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stevie Wonder agreed, and his duet with Paul McCartney not only yielded a smash-hit record that topped the charts on this day in 1982, but it also continued a trend toward pop music power-couplings that was particularly prevalent in the early 1980s. Following on the late 70s success of pairings like Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond (\u201cYou Don\u2019t Bring Me Flowers,\u201d 1978), the period from 1981-1983 witnessed a significant boom in hits from such A-list power couples, including \u201cStop Draggin\u2019 My Heart Around\u201d (Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, 1981), \u201cEndless Love\u201d (Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, 1981), \u201cIslands In The Stream\u201d (Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, 1983) and \u201cSay Say Say\u201d (Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, 1983).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Without the black keys, the white keys on a piano would pretty much be stuck playing \u201cTwinkle, Twinkle, Little Star\u201d and \u201cDo Re Mi.\u201d\u00a0 If you want anything more interesting than that\u2014if you want a song like \u201cYesterday,\u201d for instance\u2014you\u2019re going to have to get the two sets of keys working together. From this little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}