New Year's Eve 1975: Starbuck Releases "Moonlight Feels Right"

Starbuck on American Bandstand
Photo Credit
(Bruce Blackman)

It's another classic rock and roll story. Back in the early 1970s, Bruce Blackman was just a Georgia kid at Delta State slogging through summer school when he spied a picture in a local newspaper.

"Somebody had cut out an article of the contestants for the Miss Washington County contest," Blackman told the Clarion Ledger in 2014. "And I saw a girl in that photo and I said, 'who is that gorgeous girl?'"

She turned out to be Peggy Denman, a student at Mississippi Delta Junior College in Moorhead. Dutifully inspired, Blackman enrolled at the school for the fall semester and began courting Denman in earnest.

"I asked her out twice and she turned me down. So I said I'm going to try one more time. I asked her the third time and she said 'yes,' " he explained about the inspiration behind the hit song, who went on to become his wife and the mother of his daughter, Sarah. "And that's the girl. It just sounded better to say 'came to Baltimore from Ole Miss' rather than MS State or Mississippi Delta Junior College."

Once Blackman and Starbuck recorded the track, they felt confident that they indeed did have a hit on their hands: "Then every record company in the world turned it down."

The group's saving grace: WERC program director Mike St. John in Birmingham, Ala. Blackman and bandmate Bo Wagner split up and went on an extensive radio tour. "We probably went around to 300 or 400 radio stations each," Blackman said. "I went in and the guy said he'd listen to my record if I'd read the farm report." That's when the story gets interesting.

"He said 'go' and the report was about the agriculture minister from Russia. And his name was unreadable and unpronounceable. So when I got to his name in the report I said 'his name looks like the alphabet backwards' and then I kept reading. They just died laughing and they took the record. They didn't hear it until they played it on the air."

The program director loved what he heard, but told the group it sounded more like a "spring" record. It was the dead of winter at the time. But true to his word, St. John added the song to the station's playlist when spring arrived, and requests for the tune hit 25,000 in one week. The rest is history.

Released on December 31, 1975, "Moonlight Feels Right" brightened up the charts to peak at #3 for the week of July 31, 1976. The #1 song in America that week: The Manhattans with "Kiss and Say Goodbye."

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