August 9, 2015

Ray Stevens: YouTube Top-15...

In a night time blog entry I've decided to post the Top-15 YouTube music videos from Ray Stevens based upon unique views. I often do this once in awhile just to periodically check up on older music videos that continue to gather an audience but aren't the most recent uploads. In reverse order here are the Top-15 videos including the most recent capture of unique view totals...

15. Grandpa Voted Democrat: 650,783
14. Santa Claus is Watching You: 793,599
13. Sittin' Up with the Dead: 848,147
12. Everything is Beautiful: 946,509
11. Shriner's Convention: 1,023,848

10. God Save Arizona: 1,055,828
9. Throw the Bums Out!: 1,144,690
8. Obama Nation: 1,227,347
7. It's Me Again, Margaret: 1,511,117
6. Mr. President - Mr. President: 1,648,984

5. Obama Budget Plan: 3,910,972
4. The Streak: 4,852,790
3. Mississippi Squirrel Revival: 5,228,877
2. We The People: 5,286,198
1. Come to the USA: 9,170,419

For those curious his version of "Help Me Make It Through The Night" ranks at #19 with a current total of 557,348 unique views. The music video for "Ahab the Arab" ranks at #17 with 597,766. Unfortunately there had been an unofficial upload of "Ahab the Arab" on YouTube for several years prior to Ray's YouTube channel coming into existence. The unofficial upload has more than a million unique views due to it being available longer...much of the video's impact happened during the first several months of it's unofficial release. Once Ray uploaded the video onto YouTube via his channel, though, I happen to believe that it grabbed a lot of views that would've gone to the unofficial upload instead.

On a related note...the music video for "Too Drunk to Fish" that I posted about in my previous blog entry has indeed gone past the one million mark. Since it isn't part of the RayStevensMusic channel on YouTube it isn't being counted as an official video release on the video hosting site but as of this writing the unique view total is 1,000,253.

A year ago this month Ray Stevens released The Gospel Collection, Volume One. The release is associated with the Gaither Gospel Series and the marketing fell in the hands of the Gaither organization instead of it being under Ray's control. On the back of the CD and on the CD itself there are imprints of the various logos of production companies: Gaither Music Group, Clyde Records, Gaither Gospel Series, and Spring House Productions.

For a period of time Ray made the rounds of various country-gospel outlets and even appeared on the Praise the Lord series on the Trinity Broadcasting Network during the initial publicity for the CD and the main single, "If Jesus is a Stranger". In a video clip from the program, Larry's Country Diner, Ray performs "If Jesus is a Stranger"...

The clip begins in the midst of Ray speaking the opening to the song but that doesn't take away from the overall performance...



A couple of other uploads of Ray performing songs from the gospel CD are next...

Although the version of "Turn Your Radio On" on the gospel CD features the original lyrics from the late 1930s this performance includes the lyrics most commonly associated with the Ray Stevens version...



And "Amazing Grace"...the guitar player is Jimmy Capps (a regular on Larry's series playing the part of a Sheriff but in reality Capps is a legendary session musician).


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