The One-Hit Wonder Wonder

If we held a One-Hit Wonder Sweepstakes, I’d enter William DeVaughn, place some side bets, and clean up.

Let’s specify the rules for deciding the most wondrous one-hit wonder. First, it has a to be a big hit. It has to come out of every passing car’s radio. It’s got to rule the charts. Second, the artist has to become a trivia question. Nearly immediately is good, but anonymous in real time is even better. I give you: William DeVaughn.

The song was universal in the summer of 1974. Number 1 R&B, Number 4 Billboard. Sold two million records. Obscure artist? You bet. Everyone always thought it was a Curtis Mayfield hit. But even though no one knows William DeVaughn’s name, and prolly never did, I’ll bet a healthy plurality of people to this day start singing along when they hear:

Diamond in the back, sunroof top
Diggin’ the scene with a gangsta lean

Of course everyone has always gotten the line wrong, and sings digging the scene with the gasoline. If you’re wondering what the hell a gangsta lean might mean, allow me to define it for you, because, stewardess, I speak jive. Plop your hand at 12 o’clock on the steering wheel. Fingers are OK, but using your wrist is best. Lean hard to your right, preferably with your elbow on the center console of your Olds 442, or maybe your Caprice Classic. Ideally, your Monte Carlo…

Oh, the hell with it. Just watch Denzel drive.

It’s common for one hit wonders to toil in the vineyards of music for years, banging their heads on various recording studio or barroom walls, until something finally clicks. We could illustrate that with, oh, I don’t know, how about Sugarloaf? They had a big one-hitter with Green-Eyed Lady, but that was after first plowing the musical fields without much of a crop to show for it as The Surfin’ Classics, then The Classics, then The Moonrakers, then Chocolate Hair, and finally Sugarloaf.

Not so our friend William DeVaughn. His previous experience in the music business was, well, not the music business. He was a Jehovah’s Witness. He worked as a draftsman for some government agency or another. I was in the music business for quite some time, in a modest way, of course, but I don’t remember playing with many people who had a T-square and a protractor at home. Well, besides me, I mean.

With a resume like that, it’s hard to break into the music business. William did it the old fashioned way. He paid $900 of his own money to some record producers in Philadelphia to make a demo of A Cadillac Don’t Come Easy, the original title he had for the song. It might not have sounded like something, but apparently it sounded like something that could sound like something. Luckily, they had MFSB hanging around. I’ll let Wiki fill you in who that was:

MFSB, officially standing for “Mother Father Sister Brother”, was a pool of more than 30 studio musicians based at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios.[2] They worked closely with the production team of Gamble and Huff and producer/arranger Thom Bell, and backed up Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, the O’Jays, the Stylistics, the Spinners, Wilson Pickett, and Billy Paul.

Some portion of that wild bunch eventually started calling themselves TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia), and had their first hit with the Soul Train theme. Even if you watched Community Auditions instead of Soul Train when you were nursing a hangover on Saturday mornings, you’ve heard those dudes. That’s them sawing away behind the O’Jay’s in Love Train, among a metric tonne of other hits. They turned William’s idea into a stone groove.

Of course the lyrics confuse everyone, as lyrics often do. They assume William was extolling the gangsta culture, but DeVaughn wasn’t giving a shout out to the various Huggy Bears of the world, who actually drove great, big Cadillacs. His intended audience was regular people who may not have a car at all. So remember, brothers and sisters, you can still stand tall. William DeVaughn said so, and for three minutes and forty five seconds, you could roll down the window, drive slow, and believe it.