The 100 Most Lost Songs of the 1970s

It’s an easy trope. Unlike today’s music (at least pre-COVID), pop music was “about something” in the early ‘70s. That’s true of the top six songs on our Lost Factor calculations of the 100 most-lost songs of the 1970s. Our top six songs involve a broken home, Jesus, Woodstock, an underaged girl, a (seemingly) unplanned pregnancy, and, well, “My Ding-a-Ling.”

Those top six songs are definitely about something. Only the one about Woodstock is a particularly date-stamped topic. And yet, they’re still not songs that people want to hear today. The “Lost Factor” is our calculation of the songs that were the biggest hits of their year, based on their standing in the year-end the Top 100 for that year, but receive the least airplay now — no more than a single spin at any of the broadcast stations that make up our calculations.

Wayne Newton’s “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast,” the most-lost song of the ‘70s, is a textbook “Lost Factor” leader, an MOR story song by an artist whose last hit was seven years earlier, staging a comeback only a few weeks after Sammy Davis Jr. did the same. “Daddy” was also a cover of a European hit by Daniel Boone, represented on the 1972 “Lost Factor” list by his own “Beautiful Sunday.” “Daddy” was broken by top 40 powerhouse CKLW Detroit, known for breaking “Bennie & the Jets,” but also “Seasons in the Sun.” It’s often the MOR titles that are most lost to time, and yet the use of the even more MOR’ish “Danke Schoen” in Ferris Buehler’s Day Off made Newton hip for future generations. 

Being No. 1 for the decade means that “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” also led our recently published tabulation of the Lost Hits of 1970-74. In fact, one of the reasons why we’ve already published the decade in two halves (find 1975-79 here), is because the first half of the decade is so much more lost. Nearly two thirds (64%) of the top 100 comes from 1974 or earlier. The top 10 all come from 1970-74. Era-conscious broadcasters tend to flinch at the notion that they’re still playing a 40-year-old song on the radio; songs that are 45-50 years old have an even harder time enduring, especially when few listeners in radio’s 25-to-54-year-old target are likely to remember them as a current.

The artist most represented in the “Lost Factor” rankings is Donny Osmond, placing three of his own hits, three songs as part of the Osmonds, and three as part of the Donny & Marie Osmond duo. The single most “lost” artist is Helen Reddy, with five songs (the calculations were done before the recent biopic I Am Woman surfaced in the U.S.). Cher has three, including one Sonny & Cher title, but so does Alice Cooper. Cooper is a little surprising amidst the more typical teen idols, MOR acts, and retro-leaning hits (sonic throwbacks, often by comeback acts), but the four ballad hits that gave his career a new dimension in the late ‘70s are all songs with high “Lost Factor” showings.

(UPDATE: After this article was published, I got reader e-mails asking how “You Light Up My Life” could not be on here. “Don’t Give Up On Us”? “Love Will Keep Us Together”? Remember that these are the highest scores of an entire decade, dominated by songs from the first half. All three of those songs were in our calculations for their respective years, or even the half-decade. Some just missed the top 100 for the decade. Remember also that there is another tier of radio person/chart follower favorites that never quite printed as hits with the average listener to begin with. “Maybe Tomorrow” by the Jackson Five is on any list of my faves, but it never made the year end chart. It’s lost, too, but in a different way.)

Here are the 100 hits from 1970-79 with the highest “Lost Factor”:

Although the odds are always better of a song being lost to time, especially after 40 to 50 years, there are songs that receive airplay disproportionate to their place in the chart pantheon of the time. Those songs are typically Classic Rock, advantaged by the ability to receive airplay now at Classic Hits/Oldies and Adult Hits stations as well. (Classic Rock stations are also more willing to play the ‘70s these days than their poppier counterparts.)

I’ve recently dubbed some of those underperforming songs “Lucky Stiffs,” although most of the top 10 overperformers are songs that were hardly stiffs at the time. (The biggest exception is David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” already four years old when it went top 15 in America, then carried into rock libraries as Bowie cemented his multi-format stardom over the next decade or so).

Still to come, the all-time “Lost 100,” as well as calculations for the late ‘90s. After the final data exposition, we’ll start looking at topics like “lost songs that deserve to be rediscovered” or the songs that are lost now likely because of lyrical issues. We’re glad if you’ve found our “Lost Factor” articles to be a diversion in 2020.