As for this poll's introduction, I say "kind of" because one thing I ike to do in conjunction with my listening to American Top 40 1970's and '80's rebroadcasts is to peruse a PDF of the issue of Billboard Magazine from which Casey Kasem counted down that week's top pop singles. Have you ever been such a chart watcher as to regularly read any music industry trade magazines?

In my scanning through the Billboard corresponding to any given week's '70's and '80's AT40, I read more than the issue's pop coverage. Per the basis for this poll, I found the country singles chart for the first week covered in 1977 somewhat strange (there was no chart for the previous week because the publisher takes a two-week-break the last week of any given year). The first oddity is a small clutch of singles debuting in the 80's and 90's already on their way to becoming big pop hits. If you're familiar wtih any of the following songs, which do you think could pass for country music nowadays?

Converse to the situation presented in the previous question, a band that scored pop hits regularly throughout much of the '70's was charting higher this week country-wise with a song that didn't crack pop's top 40. Dr. Hook jumped from the lower 40s tr the lower 30s over the past week (or two?) with "If Not You." The band, originally named Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, would go disco--at least for their single choices--as the '70's closed, but based on the song included here and their earlier work you may know, how country would you say they were?

Much further up the chart, in the top five, is a rare instance where a singer and a character played by that artist is credited with singing a song. "Baby Boy" was recorded by Mary Kay Place as Loretta Haggers; Haggers is the aspiring country singer neighbor of Mary Hartman and her husband on the nighttime syndicated comedic soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman that was popular at the time. "Boy" has an air of comedy about it, but Place, to my ears, is no joke as a singer. Regardless radio format or chart, can you think of any other hit records credited to TV or movie characters?

The last weirdness coming to my mind regarding this week in charting country music 48 years ago (!) is the peculiar absence of a song from the country tally...and its appearance in in the upper 90s on that week's soul listing. O.B. McClinton had briefly been a reliable mid-charting country singer earlier in the '70's; "Black Speck" is a country song/recitation, but an especially funky one, wherein he goes on about being African-American in his field and how surprised some lighter-skinned listeners were shocked that there's another country singer with McClintion's melanin level other than Charley Pride (to whom McClinton alludes in "Speck"). In its unedited version, McClinton uses a reviled epithet for folk of his pigmentation. Included here is the, ahem, Negro-free radio edit. Even without problematic slang, do you think this or another similarly-themed song could become a commercial country and/or soul radio hit nowadays?