He didn’t think of himself as a potential recording artist, but Quincy Jones heard him on demos and liked his voice. Ingram got his start as a keyboard player and an occasional demo singer. James Ingram was involved in a lot of hits in the ’80s, but he was never exactly a central figure within the pop-music narrative. But with Ingram’s second chart-topper, I must confess, I have no fucking idea how it happened. Ingram and Patti Austin’s duet “ Baby, Come To Me” reached #1 in 1983 because the song prominently soundtracked a General Hospital love scene, back in the era where songs could blow up just by playing in the background on daytime soap operas. With the first, though, there’s a clear trajectory. Both of those chart-topping hits were fairly unlikely. For instance: James Ingram, the smooth and sensitive balladeer, reached #1 twice in his career. Songs follow all sorts of weird, unconventional routes to hit status, and sometimes, even decades later, it’s virtually impossible to look back and reconstruct how it happened. How do songs become hits? It looks like a simple question, but it almost never is. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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