For as long as the Billboard charts have existed, chart accreditation has been a tricky thing. The question of who gets listed as what on a Billboard chart entry can come down to a matter of industry politics, label or artist demands and/or sheer form-filling drudgery. As a result, there are times when the credits can end up reading as redundant, insufficient or straight-up inaccurate. And in the most extreme cases, sometimes an artist can get credited on a song where they didn’t actually do anything on the recording.
Such was the case for at least three songs that reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. While in all three such cases, the song in question ended up being the biggest Hot 100 hit for its respective performing artist — for two of them, it was their only Hot 100 hit — in each case, said artist did not actually do any performing on the song, at least not musically. Their accreditation on their respective hits instead came down to cases of unfair promotional practices, sloppy paperwork or sheer industry unpredictability.
Read on below to find out how it happened for all three.
Bill Parsons, “The All American Boy”
Bill Parsons was an aspiring country singer-songwriter who had just gotten back from military service in the late ’50s, when his friend Bobby Bare — a future Grammy winner and Country Music Hall of Famer — decided to do him a favor. Trying to help him break into the industry, Bare showed Parsons how to record a demo by putting together a take on “The All American Boy,” a song penned by Orville Lunsford in a talking-blues style, which was meant to loosely echo the tale of Elvis Presley becoming a gigantic rock star before getting drafted into the U.S. Army.
The recording was only meant to be a reference, with Parsons later recording another version himself for release. But Fraternity Records bought the recording, along with one Parsons made of the folk song “Rubber Dolly,” and released them both on the same record under Parsons’ name. Parsons is often listed as a co-writer with Lunsford on “All American Boy,” but whether this is accurate or another mislabeling mishap — or additional industry chicanery — remains unclear. (For his part, Bare seems to believe Parsons had nothing to do with the song’s creation, telling Billboard in 2014 that the release of “All American Boy” under Parsons’ name “scared him to death. He didn’t even know the song.”)
Because Bare had to report for military service himself shortly after the song’s release, and was not a recognized name yet himself anyway, Parsons continued to promote the song, miming along to it for performances. The song became a huge hit under Parsons’ name, topping out at No. 2 on the Hot 100 dated Feb. 2, 1959, right behind The Platters’ doo-wop classic “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” However, future recordings of Parsons’ confused his studio collaborators and potential audiences, who didn’t understand why he didn’t sound like the guy on his hit single, and he never scored another Hot 100 hit.
Meanwhile, when Bare returned from the military, he began a recording career under his own name, signing with RCA Victor in 1962. He would quickly become one of the biggest country hitmakers of the ’60s, with seven Hot 100 entries — at a time when country crossovers on the chart were less common than they are currently — including the top 10 hit “500 Miles Away From Home.” But he never got as high on the chart as he did with “The All American Boy,” a song with his voice on it, but not his name.
Cliff Nobles, “The Horse”
Alabama-born, Philadelphia-based soul singer Cliff Nobles formed a band in the mid-’60s called Cliff Nobles & Co., also including bassist guitarist Bobby Tucker, bassist Benny Williams and drummer Robert Marshall. The outfit signed with Phil-L.A. of Soul (as in “filet of sole”) Records, and released its first record: “Love Is All Right,” a rousing rave-up written and produced by Jesse James, featuring a blaring hook from the James Boys, the horn section who would later comprise part of the Hot 100-topping group MFSB. The song’s funk-soul groove was undeniable, but Nobles’ lyric was perhaps a little nondescript and repetitive.
Radio DJs of the late ’60s had a solution to that issue. On the flip side to the “Love Is All Right” single was an instrumental version of the song titled “The Horse,” presumably due to its galloping rhythm. Without Nobles’ vocal covering it in the mix, the song’s horn-led melody was able to really punch through, and it captivated late-’60s audiences. “The Horse” became part of a wave of hit pop and soul instrumentals swarming the Hot 100 in the summer of 1968, also including Hugo Montenegro, His Orchestra and Chorus’ twangy rendition of Ennio Morricone’s “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” theme, Mason Williams’ acoustic guitar riffer “Classical Gas” and Hugh Masekela’s trumpet-led jazz frolic “Grazing in the Grass.”
Like “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “Classical Gas,” “The Horse” peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100, spending three weeks (starting on the chart dated June 29) stuck behind “This Guy’s in Love With You” by Herb Alpert — the trumpet great primarily known for instrumental hits, who, ironically, had just started to sing on his records. Since singing was all that Nobles did in his band, the success of “The Horse” was really attributable solely to the “& Co.” part of the outfit — but Nobles still led the credit, and would dance to the song during live appearances, miming a lasso twirl during the instrumental refrain.
Cliff Nobles & Co. continued to release singles after, including the “Horse” sequel “Horse Fever” — also primarily an instrumental, but at least with some “Dance to the Music”-style vocal bum-bums laid over the top. That single graced the Hot 100 (at No. 68) later in 1968, as did the entirely instrumental “Switch It On” the next year (No. 93), and then that was it for Cliff Nobles on the chart, with or without the “& Co.” Nobles ultimately got out of the music industry, working in construction and later electricity generation before his death in 2008.
Felly, “Pump Up the Jam”
As the top 40 landscape at the turn of the ’90s was swarmed by dance-pop singles from producer-DJ teams — often with non-descript, video-unfriendly images — the guest singers and rappers on those singles were increasingly asked to take center stage in the songs’ promotion. Except sometimes, even those singers and rappers weren’t considered photogenic or media-ready enough — and they got replaced in the music videos by non-performer models, who lip synched along to the lyrics while looking the part a little more to the artists’ and labels’ satisfaction.
Legendary disco vocalist Martha Wash of The Weather Girls was the most frequent victim of this practice, with her soaring vocals helping propel massive hits by Black Box (“Everybody Everybody”) and C+C Music Factory (“Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”), but with her name often left off the records’ credits, and with models miming to her vocals in the music videos. But Belgian Eurodance collective Technotronic even took it a step further, actually giving its video model an artist credit on its hit single. “It was very difficult for us to export music to other countries,” Technotronic founder Jo Bogaert explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “We needed Felly to help promote the group at first — to create this image.”
Felly Killingi was a Congolese fashion model who was positioned by Technotronic as the vocalist behind the rap verses and sung chorus on the outfit’s 1989 breakthrough hit: the dancefloor scorcher “Pump Up the Jam.” The song was credited to “Technotronic featuring Felly,” and it rose to No. 2 on the Hot 100 for the final two weeks of January 1990 (behind Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You”). But those vocals were actually provided by Congolese-Belgian rapper Ya Kid K, who also performed throughout the group’s debut album (likewise titled Pump Up the Jam), including follow-up top 10 hit “Get Up (Before the Night Is Over)” (No. 7).
The group did eventually start to integrate Ya Kid K more explicitly into its presentation, featuring both her and Felly in the “Get Up” video, and actually crediting Ya Kid K as a featured artist on 1992’s “Move This” (No. 5) — by which point she had also fully replaced Felly, who had since departed the group, in the music video. (“Now the music is a hit,” Bogaert told the L.A. Times, explaining why he felt the group no longer needed Felly. “The music — not an image — is carrying us now.”) After parting with Technotronic, Felly did try her hand at an actual recording carer, releasing a pair of singles (“Time Flies” and “Party Time”) on RCA in 1992, but finding little chart success.
And of course, the most infamous lip syncing story in pop music history also transpired around the turn of the ’90s, with vocal duo Milli Vanilli becoming one of the biggest sensations in popular music before being exposed for not contributing musically to any of their hit records. That duo scored a trio of No. 1 hits (“Baby Don’t Forget My Number,” “Girl, I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Blame It on the Rain”) in 1989, but it all started for them with a song that peaked at No. 2: the unshakeable dance-pop singalong “Girl You Know It’s True.”
