Before Carole King was the voice of Tapestry, she was half of the most successful songwriting partnership of the 1960s. With Gerry Goffin, her husband and lyricist, she wrote dozens of hits for other artists — “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Up on the Roof,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” But one of their lesser-remembered gems took a strange and wonderful detour: “Hi-De-Ho (That Old Sweet Roll),” a song the duo wrote that became a brass-rock hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1970 — and that King herself wouldn’t reclaim on record for another ten years.
The song comes from the deep Goffin-King catalog, the hundreds of songs they wrote together in the Brill Building era and beyond. “Hi-De-Ho” is a playful, old-timey number — the title itself a nod to the hep-cat slang of an earlier generation, the kind of phrase Cab Calloway might have tossed off between choruses. It’s the sound of two young songwriters showing off their range: they could write teenage melodrama, soul, pop — and a vaudeville-flavored shuffle, too.
Blood, Sweat & Tears found it, or it found them. The band — the architects of the brass-rock boom — recorded “Hi-De-Ho” for their third album, BS&T 3, released in June 1970. It opened side one, all 4 minutes and 27 seconds of it, with David Clayton-Thomas’s gritty, soulful lead vocal riding over the band’s horn section. The album was produced by drummer Bobby Colomby and Roy Halee, the engineer behind Simon & Garfunkel’s biggest records, and it went to number one in the United States.
Released as a single, “Hi-De-Ho” climbed to number 14 on the US Billboard Pop Singles chart and number 5 on Canada’s RPM chart in 1970. It wasn’t the band’s biggest hit — “Spinning Wheel” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” had gone higher — but it was a solid top-15 record that kept the band’s remarkable chart run alive. For Goffin and King, it was another line on a résumé that already read like the history of American pop: their song, sung by a Canadian belter, backed by a New York horn band, climbing the charts in the summer of 1970.
And then the song went quiet — for a decade. King launched her solo career, became a superstar, and the song stayed off her own records through the seventies. It wasn’t on Writer, her 1970 solo debut, whose track list runs from “Spaceship Races” to “Up on the Roof” with no room for the old Goffin-King shuffle. It belonged, in the public mind, to Blood, Sweat & Tears.
That changed in 1980. King recorded Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King, an album of her old partnership’s songs, released in June 1980 on Capitol. The sessions took place in January 1980 at Pecan Street Studios in Austin, Texas, co-produced by King and Mark Hallman. And there, finally, was “Hi De Ho” — her version, running 3:35, cut with a Texas band: Eric Johnson on lead guitar, Christopher Cross on rhythm guitar, Reese Wynans on keyboards, Charles Larkey on bass. It’s a homecoming record in every sense: the songwriter, back in a room in Austin, reclaiming a song she’d given away a decade earlier.
Pearls got a respectful reception — four stars from AllMusic, a B-minus from Robert Christgau — and it gave King her last hit to date: “One Fine Day,” which climbed to number 12. “Hi De Ho” wasn’t the single, but it’s the album’s quiet thesis: these songs were hers before they were anyone’s. Hearing King sing it in 1980, you can hear a different artist than the one who wrote it in the sixties — older, drier, amused. The vaudeville shuffle suits her.
The song is also a reminder of how the Brill Building worked. Goffin and King didn’t write in a single style; they wrote to order, in whatever style the market wanted — girl groups, soul shouters, teen idols. “Hi-De-Ho” reads like a genre exercise that escaped the lab: a vaudeville shuffle written by two young songwriters who had absorbed the entire history of American popular song and could pastiche any of it on demand. That versatility is why their catalog survived the sixties when so many of their peers’ didn’t.
The timing of the Blood, Sweat & Tears version mattered. In the summer of 1970, brass-rock was at its commercial peak, and BS&T were its flagship band — their third album went to number one while “Hi-De-Ho” worked its way up the singles chart. Hearing Clayton-Thomas, a Canadian blues belter, growl his way through a Goffin-King vaudeville number backed by a New York horn section is one of those only-in-1970 collisions. It shouldn’t have worked. It did.
King’s 1980 homecoming had its own logic. By then she was a decade past Tapestry, recording in Austin with Texas players, looking back at the partnership that had started everything. Pearls wasn’t a nostalgia trip so much as a reclaiming — the songwriter asserting, gently, that these songs were hers before they were hits for anyone else. “Hi De Ho,” tucked into the track list, is the sound of that assertion at its most good-humored.
There’s a larger story here about the Goffin-King catalog and how it moved through the world. Their songs were covered by everyone — the Beatles, the Monkees, Aretha Franklin — but “Hi-De-Ho” is one of the few that became a hit for a band as far from the Brill Building as you could get: a horn-driven rock outfit with a Canadian shouter up front. That it worked — that it reached number 14 in America — is a testament to the durability of the writing. A good song is a good song, whether it’s sung by the Drifters or a brass-rock band or, finally, by the woman who wrote it.
What to listen for
“Hi-De-Ho (That Old Sweet Roll)” never became a standard. But it did something rarer: it lived two full lives — a brass-rock hit in 1970, a songwriter’s homecoming in 1980 — and both of them worked.