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Rate-A-Record

A Brand new Plethora of Pop Series

Terry Barr
3 min readJun 21, 2022
Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Certain people of my era — semi baby boomers — remember Dick Clark’s American Bandstand well. Sure, performing artists lip-synched their songs, but when you were stuck in bum-field Alabama as I was, you grabbed your pop/rock/soul music any way you could.

Sometimes the Jackson 5 would play; sometimes The Dave Clark Five, or even Jefferson Airplane performing “White Rabbit” to the consternation of anyone over 35 who might have been listening.

A segment of the show I never much cared for — because it was brief and sketchy — was…

RATE-A-RECORD

a place where two teens stood there with Dick, listened to snippets of two songs, and then rated them anywhere from 35–98. Don’t ask me why these numbers, and never doubt that the sings either were, could be, or perhaps never possibly could be hits. The only one I remember was a novelty tune by The Pipkins:

“Gimme Dat Ding,”

and no, I don’t remember how high/low it was rated.

But all that got me to thinking that a way to keep older music alive is to play the game here!

So, I will propose the two songs, give you a link to both, and then in the comments, have at it. Winners, losers, ties, who really cares? The music of our…

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Terry Barr
Terry Barr

Written by Terry Barr

I write about music, culture, equality, and my Alabama past in The Riff, The Memoirist, Prism and Pen, Counter Arts, and am an editor for Plethora of Pop.

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