Don McLean was the brooding balladeer of “American Pie” and “Vincent”, a writer of elegies and riddles. So the strangest hit of his career is not one of the epics. It is a two-minute lullaby, written as a tribute to Fred Astaire, sung in the bright, clipped style of a 1930s novelty song — which reached number one on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart in 1975, was sung back to its composer by Astaire himself, and arrived, in the words of AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann, too late to save the album it came from. “Wonderful Baby” is the most charming anomaly in McLean’s catalogue: a hit that seems to have wandered in from another era entirely, because in a sense it had.
A Tribute in Two Minutes
The song was written by McLean for Fred Astaire, and everything about it is a period reconstruction. At barely two minutes long it wears the shape of a Depression-era dance-band trifle: a lilting, childlike lyric addressed to a beloved “wonderful baby”, delivered with McLean grinning audibly through the microphone. The charm, though, has an edge. Record World, reviewing the single in its issue of 5 April 1975, caught the song’s double nature perfectly, describing it as “portraying heaven as a place where soaring cherubs count their digits”, and calling it “a top 40 lullabye which should fly higher than any since ‘Vincent’.” Critics have often noted that beneath the nursery sweetness McLean salted the lyric with a quietly caustic awareness of mortality — angels counting on their fingers, a baby’s innocence measured against a heaven full of bookkeeping. It is a McLean song, after all: even the lullaby is about the end of something.
Listen closely and the song is slyer than its smile. The baby being serenaded exists in a heaven where, as Record World noted, cherubs occupy themselves counting their fingers — eternity as an infant’s game, forever and a day spent on arithmetic a child outgrows. McLean’s lyric keeps folding the very old into the very young: the beloved is ageless and infantile at once, adored with a devotion that is half romance and half lullaby, and the singer’s tenderness is shadowed by the knowledge that everything adored this way was already vanishing. Astaire himself was 75, his film career long behind him. The tribute is also, unmistakably, an elegy — for the baby, for the dancer, for the whole bright world of the thirties musical that television reruns were even then turning into archaeology. McLean had made his name compressing a decade of loss into “American Pie”; here he did it in two minutes, with a smile.
The choice of dedicatee was no gimmick. Astaire represented, for a songwriter obsessed with vanished Americas, the purest form of popular art the country had produced — grace without strain, virtuosity worn lightly. McLean, who had written “American Pie” as an elegy for one lost golden age, wrote “Wonderful Baby” as a valentine to another: the top-hat world of the 1930s musical, already forty years gone when he recorded it.
Homeless Brother and the Single That Came Too Late
The song appeared on Homeless Brother, McLean’s fifth album, released by United Artists in November 1974. The album was his most deliberately eclectic: produced by Joel Dorn, it mixed the title track — a portrait of a hobo, sung with Pete Seeger among the background voices — with George Harrison’s “Sunshine Life for Me (Sail Away Raymond)”, the boogie of “La La Love You”, and “Wonderful Baby”‘s excursion into the thirties. Cissy Houston, whose daughter Whitney would later remake pop history, was among the album’s background singers.
The producer was part of the experiment. Joel Dorn had made his reputation in jazz and R&B, producing landmark records for Roberta Flack and Bette Midler, and he gave Homeless Brother a warmth and looseness unlike the polish of McLean’s hit albums. On “Wonderful Baby” that touch shows as restraint: rather than dressing the song in fake shellac crackle, Dorn lets McLean’s vocal and the tune’s bounce do the impersonation of 1935 unaided. The result fools the ear twice — it sounds antique and completely unforced at once, which is precisely how Astaire’s own performances felt.
As a commercial proposition it struggled. The first single, “La La Love You”, failed to ignite, and the album foundered in the marketplace. Only months later did United Artists pull “Wonderful Baby” as a single, in June 1975, with “Birthday Song” on the B-side. By then the album’s moment had passed; as Ruhlmann put it in his AllMusic retrospective, the song’s success came “too late to help the album”. Homeless Brother remains a connoisseur’s favourite rather than a bestseller — which makes the afterlife of its most whimsical track all the stranger.
Number One Where It Counted
On the pop chart, the single was a modest ripple: number 93 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 94 on Cash Box. But adult contemporary radio — the format where McLean’s core audience now lived — embraced it completely. “Wonderful Baby” climbed to number one on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart, the second and last chart-topper of McLean’s career on that survey, and repeated the feat on Canada’s RPM Adult Contemporary chart. Joel Whitburn’s chart histories record it as a genuine number one, not a footnote.
The context sharpens the achievement. By 1975 McLean’s commercial momentum had cooled from its 1972 peak: the single that preceded “Wonderful Baby” in his discography, “If We Try” in 1973, had been an adult contemporary record rather than a pop hit, and Homeless Brother itself had sold modestly. Easy Listening radio was where his audience had migrated, and “Wonderful Baby” was almost engineered for it — except that “engineered” is the wrong word for a song written as a labour of love for a retired dancer. The chart it topped was the chart of Perry Como’s and Andy Williams’s America, the America of the parents of the kids who had bought “American Pie”. McLean reached that summit not by sanding down his writing but by writing, deliberately, in the idiom of 1935.
The split verdict — ignored by pop, crowned by adult contemporary — tells its own story about 1975. Billboard’s Easy Listening chart was no consolation bracket: it was the commercial centre of gravity for singers from Sinatra to John Denver, and a number one there meant saturation on the most-listened-to daytime radio in America. McLean’s lullaby ruled that format while the Hot 100 barely noticed it, a reminder that the seventies music business ran several separate Americas at once, and a song could be a phenomenon in one and invisible in another.
There is a pleasant irony in the geography of that success. “American Pie” and “Vincent” had made McLean a star for the rock audience; “Wonderful Baby” — a song with no guitars to speak of, no allegory to decode, nothing but a remembered dance routine in its bones — proved he could top a chart ruled by crooners and MOR balladeers with a two-minute act of homage. It also quietly rewrote the shape of his career: for the rest of the decade his American hits would come in the adult contemporary and country fields, culminating in his revival of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in 1981. The lullaby was the bridge.
Astaire Sings It Back
And then the tribute completed its circle. Fred Astaire, then in his mid-seventies and decades past his last film musical, recorded “Wonderful Baby” himself, including it on his 1975 album Attitude Dancing — a record on which the old master applied himself to the work of contemporary songwriters. AllMusic’s review of Astaire’s complete recordings notes the song among the standouts of his late discography. Astaire was famously choosy about material, and he was under no commercial pressure to oblige a young folksinger; the album was a connoisseur’s project, not a comeback bid. He sang “Wonderful Baby” because the song was good, and because it sounded — this was the whole point — as if it might have been written for one of his RKO pictures forty years earlier. The image is irresistible: the greatest dancer of the twentieth century, at 76, singing a lullaby written in homage to him by the folk singer who mourned Buddy Holly — and singing it straight, as if it had always been a standard.
It is hard to think of another songwriter of McLean’s generation who received that particular honour. Dylan’s heroes did not record Dylan; Paul Simon’s did not record Simon. For McLean — whose entire art was a conversation with the American past, from Buddy Holly to the Weavers to Roy Orbison — Astaire’s voice on “Wonderful Baby” was the past answering back, accepting the valentine on its own terms. It remains the only McLean composition ever recorded by Fred Astaire — a distinction no other songwriter of his generation can claim in quite that form. Astaire’s endorsement certified what the Easy Listening chart had already said: “Wonderful Baby” was not a novelty or a pastiche but a song that could pass, undetected, into the repertoire it saluted. Half a century on, it remains the sweetest two minutes McLean ever recorded — proof that the man who sang about the day the music died also knew, better than almost anyone, how to keep the old music alive.