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Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits

from Coast to Coast. I'm Chris Mulanfee, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's

Why Is This Song No. 1 series on today's show. 27 years ago, in February 1996, a former

college bar band from Columbia, South Carolina was performing this song on television, live

from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The song was called I'm Going Home, but this

for some wasn't going home anytime soon. They were on the Grammy Awards, not only performing

a track from their 12 times platinum album, but also winning statuettes, including the

coveted Best New Artist Prize. They'd had an awfully good year.

Hoody and the Blowfish, a band formed at the University of South Carolina in the 1980s,

and fronted by a gifted vocalist named Darius Rucker, had succeeded beyond anyone's wildest

imaginations, their own Atlantic records, the A&R man who'd signed them to Atlantic,

and most especially, an army of 90s rock critics, who found Hoody's music mild, derivative,

and inexplicably popular.

Hoody and the Blowfish had the last laugh. The band not only had the top selling album

...