“Long Cool Woman” by The Hollies

"Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" came off the Hollies' album Distant Light and went out as a single in April 1972, a lean, murky slab of swamp rock, all low-slung strut and growl, the kind of record that sounds like it was cut with the humidity turned all the way up.

The credit reads Allan Clarke, Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, though Clarke has said he and Cook wrote it, with Greenaway on the label thanks to a standing pact that whatever either partner wrote went out under both names. Nobody was complaining about the result. It climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 that September, stuck behind Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" for two weeks, and sold 2 million copies around the world, 1.5 million of them in America.

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