A-side "Honey" Released February 17, 1968 Recorded January 30, 1968 | B-side "Danny" Format Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM Genre Country | |
"Honey", also known as "Honey (I Miss You)", is a song written by Bobby Russell. He first produced it with former Kingston Trio member Bob Shane. Then he gave it to American singer Bobby Goldsboro, who recorded it for his 1968 album of the same name, originally titled Pledge of Love.
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The song's narrator mourns his deceased lover, beginning with him looking at a tree in their garden, remembering how "it was just a twig" on the day she planted it (with his disapproval). This single about the loss of a loved one hit No. 1 the week after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Further, the Hot 100 top 10 run of "Honey" began the week of the King assassination and ended the week of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and no other Hot 100 entry had a top 10 run that spanned that same time interval.
Release
It was released as a single in the U.S. in 1968 and spent five weeks at No. 1 the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart, from April 7 to May 11 (the 200th song to do so), and three weeks atop Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart. It was preceded on the Billboard Hot 100 by "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding and was followed by Archie Bell & the Drells' "Tighten Up". It was Goldsboro's only No. 1 hit on the Pop Singles and Country Singles charts and it was his first song to top the Adult Contemporary chart. Billboard ranked the record as the No. 3 song for 1968.
"Honey" reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart and a re-release of the single in the United Kingdom in 1975 (see 1975 in music) reached No. 2 again. In Australia, it spent four weeks at No. 1 on the ARIA Charts, replacing The Beatles' "Lady Madonna", and was the No. 6 song of 1968.
Reception
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the song frequently appears on "worst songs of all-time" lists, and in April 2006, Todd Leopold of CNN named it the "Worst Song of All Time." In the 1970s when radio DJ Tony Blackburn was going through his divorce with his wife Tessa Wyatt, he regularly played "Honey" and would comment live on air about how much he missed his wife. This was parodied in the "mockumentary" Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era.