Song of the Day 5/26: Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”

I wanted to follow up yesterday’s examination of “We Built This City” with another tune that turns up high on most lists of Worst Songs Ever, so I offer this wildly popular No. 1 hit from 1988, the first and still the only a cappella song to top the charts.

Nobody has ever been able to determine how or why “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” became a nationwide phenomenon in the last year of the Reagan presidency. Bobby McFerrin was a jazz singer who started as a pianist, then decided to switch to singing (his father was the first Black to sing with New York’s Metropolitan Opera) and spent four years practicing his technique before playing out. Before He recorded two LPs, the first in 1982, before 1988’s “Simple Pleasures,” the all-a cappella album that included “Don’t Worry,” without attracting attention outside jazz circles.

The song got a boost from its inclusion in the critically savaged hit film “Cocktail” (another tune on the soundtrack, the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo,” regularly appears on Worst Song Ever lists), and its popularity prompted its unauthorized use by George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign, giving it even more exposure. The reggae flavor tapped into the popularity of that genre, and people were fascinated by McFerrin’s ability to vocalize so many sounds.

But the backlash came quickly. By the next summer, Chuck D was ripping it in “Fight the Power,” and criticism coalesced around the lyric’s panglossian advice.

McFerrin said the song pretty much wrote itself. He saw a poster of Meher Baba with the phrase and thought it was “a pretty neat philosophy in four words,” so he began singing it. “I would do it in clubs, it wasn’t finished, I didn’t have all the lyrics and stuff figured out but I would just sing the refrain and just improvise, playing with it a little bit. When I was in the studio recording ‘Simple Pleasures,’ it wasn’t even on the docket as a tune, I wasn’t even considering it. It never even came to my mind until, while I was working on some other piece and I got stuck, I couldn’t figure out what to do with it.

“I dismissed the engineer and everybody and I went in the back and I wrote out the lyrics, I called everyone back and I sang it, and I think the whole thing took about 45 minutes. I didn’t pay much mind to it. I thought it was kind of a nifty tune but I had no idea it was going to do anywhere near what it did as far as sales and popularity.”

Though the song made McFerrin a lot of money, he stopped performing it in concert by the end of 1988 because he didn’t want to be pigeonholed. It swept the Grammy Awards in 1989, but McFerrin’s performing career soon settled into its old groove, though the exposure did get him a lot of work scoring films.

Perhaps McFerrin’s lasting legacy comes in his revival of a cappella singing as a popular form. Before his hit, a cappella singing in popular music had faded away with doo-wop. A decade after it, every college campus in the country was home to a cappella groups performing popular rock songs. “Simple Pleasures” included several such covers, including “Drive My Car,” “Them Changes,” and, maybe most improbably, this Cream classic.