If you listen to 80s stations, you’d think there were only 200 songs recorded during that decade. As much as I love “Come on Eileen,” “Tainted Love,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” or “Billie Jean,” I’m totally burned out on these handful of hits. Which I why when I listen to 80s stations nowadays, I tend to listen to the Top 40 countdowns for a particular week during some random year in that decade. Here is where you get to hear a lot of songs that were hits, but for whatever reason, are shut out of the very tight programming of such stations. Some of these rarely played songs are terrible … some of them are great. “This Little Girl” by Gary U.S. Bonds is one of the great ones.

Gary U.S. Bonds was a rocker from the early 1960s who had a lot of seminal hits back in the day (“New Orleans,” “Quarter to Three”) and then faded away until Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band resurrected Bonds in 1981 with a hit album (“Dedication”) and this gem that made it all the way to #11 on the Billboard charts that year.

I don’t know about you, but where I lived at the time (Tidewater, VA area), you could not escape this song that year. This song was EVERYWHERE and then after a year, I never heard it again … until I happened upon one of those Top 40 countdown shows that replayed the most popular songs for a particular week in 1981. A great, great song that should be in heavy rotation on these 80s stations, but sadly isn’t.