“Wonderful World” by Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World" sat in the Keen Records vaults for more than a year before the label let it loose in April 1960. He'd cut it on the fly in March 1959, at his last session for Keen, and by the time it came out he was on RCA Victor, so his old label's single went head to head with his new ones. It outran several of them and gave him his biggest hit since 1957's "You Send Me".

Lou Adler and Herb Alpert wrote most of it, but Cooke reworked the lyric to put schooling further into the picture, and that's where its easy charm lives. It peaked at 12 on the Hot 100 and 2 on the R&B chart, then came around again: Animal House used it in 1978, and a 1986 reissue, nudged along by sound-alikes in Witness and a Levi's 501 ad, reached 2 in Britain and went gold.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.