Debby Boone sang the 1970s smash hit “You Light Up My Life” with God in her heart. Patti Smith's version was truer to the life of the song’s shady composer.
In 1979, Patti Smith, at the peak of her outsider punk fame, went on the ABC television show “Kids Are People Too”—the viewership was made up almost entirely of tweens—and, given the choice of any song, belted out a weirdly moving rendition of Debby Boone’s smash hit “You Light Up My Life,” the song that spent 10 weeks at number one in the summer of 1977, breaking records set by Bobby Darin and the Beatles .
The tune had been written by ad man Joseph Brooks for the soundtrack of Brooks’s self-produced, self-directed film of the same name. Brooks made an inspired choice in Boone. She was young , pretty in a generic West Coast sort of way, operatic and the inheritor of a great schlock tradition. Her father Pat Boone’s cover versions of R&B hits by Fats Domino and Little Richard are what people really mean when they denounce cultural appropriation. Elvis singing Big Mama Thorton is a revelation.
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