America turned 200 to a soundtrack of fireworks and marching bands. But the song sitting atop the Billboard Hot 100 that week was something a good deal cheekier.
The perfect, improbable timing
"Afternoon Delight" reached No. 1 on July 10, 1976, as Deadline recounted — days after the Bicentennial Fourth of July, when the country was awash in red, white and blue. Into that earnest moment came a sunlit slice of soft-pop about, not to put too fine a point on it, sneaking away for daytime romance. Its innuendo was plain enough to raise an eyebrow and gentle enough to sail onto family radio, and the contrast with the season's patriotic pomp is a big part of why it stuck.
A very Washington hit
The Starland Vocal Band was a four-piece out of Washington, D.C., built around the songwriting couple Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, with Jon Carroll and Margot Chapman. They had a serious pedigree: Danoff and Nivert co-wrote "Take Me Home, Country Roads" with John Denver, and it was Denver's Windsong label that released "Afternoon Delight." The title, as the band told it over the years, came from the appetizer menu at a Georgetown restaurant — a phrase too good not to build a song around.
Grammy gold, then the curse
The industry rewarded it fast. At the 1977 Grammy Awards, the Starland Vocal Band won Best New Artist — beating out, among others, the rock band Boston — and also took the award for Best Arrangement for Voices. It looked like the start of something. It wasn't. The group never landed another hit on remotely the same scale, disbanded in 1981, and became a textbook one-hit wonder, the kind of act whose entire legacy rides on a single indelible chorus.
Why it won't go away
"Afternoon Delight" has proved unusually durable for a novelty smash. Its close, sunny harmonies keep turning up in movies and television — a memorably straight-faced group singalong in "Anchorman," a needle-drop in "Good Will Hunting," and appearances everywhere from "Glee" to "Arrested Development" — each one reintroducing the song, and its cheerful double meaning, to a new audience that can't quite believe it topped the charts.
That is the small, funny truth of the Bicentennial summer. Amid all the flags and fireworks, the tune Americans actually couldn't stop humming wasn't about the country at all. It was about slipping away for an afternoon — and 50 years on, it still sounds like July.
