As I write this fan created blog entry the clock sits at 11:59pm on a Wednesday night. As I glance down I see that we're now into Thursday morning, January 30th. On the social media posts of Ray Stevens yesterday there happened to be a YouTube video upload of the audio track of "In the Mood". This recording goes back to 1976 in the career of Ray Stevens. It was his third single release for Warner Brothers. The novelty was released as the Henhouse Five Plus Too and it became a Top-40 single early in 1977. In the liner notes of a CD released by Rhino Records in 1997 titled The Very Best of Ray Stevens the notes author, Dr. Demento, quotes Ray on the inspiration for "In the Mood" performed as a choir of chickens. I'll paraphrase the quote by saying that Ray had the idea to cluck the song, which also includes vocal accompaniment from a vocally mimicked cow and a goat, just to see how it would come off. The instrumentation is sparse. Ray insists that he didn't want to issue it as a single but Warner Brothers loved the concept and it was issued as the Henhouse Five Plus Too in December 1976.
The single hit the Hot 100 pop chart on January 8, 1977 and by it's 4th week on, January 29, 1977, it was knocking on the door of the Top-40 half of the Hot 100. On the country chart it had a similar brisk climb up the chart and was actually in the country Top-40 on January 29th. It spent several weeks at number 39 on the country chart. On the Easy-Listening chart, believe it or not, it reached the Top-40 in that format as well. In it's fifth week on the Hot 100 it pushed it's way into the Top-40, anchoring the chart for one week...for the week ending February 5, 1977. In it's sixth week on the country singles chart, February 12th, it fell ten notches. The same week, on the Hot 100, "In the Mood" fell out of the Top-40 by a single position and into pop music history as the very next week it was outside the Top-50 and on it's way off the Hot 100. Ray's pseudonym, Henhouse Five Plus Too, is officially credited as the performers of "In the Mood" and they're often cited as One Hit Wonders. Last year I wrote a blog entry titled Symphonic Chickens which goes into detail about Ray's various novelty songs featuring the chicken as the subject matter. This blog entry, as one could tell, was put together as a response to the YouTube audio track upload of "In the Mood"...
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