25 essential songs that didn’t make the Philly 76 song list

Only 76 songs to encapsulate the history of the boundlessly rich and impossibly varied sound of Philadelphia?

That wasn’t nearly enough.

Earlier this year, in time for the approaching Philly 250 celebration of the nation’s Semiquincentennial, and with the help of my classical music colleague Peter Dobrin, I compiled a list of 76 Songs made in the city — or about the city, or by people from the city or region — that are essentially Philadelphian.

I’m not complaining. It was fun and sent me on journeys of discovery to learn stuff I didn’t know about the bottomless depth of Philly soul, the city’s enthralling jazz history or the range of indie rock that’s become a calling card this century.

But list-making is a difficult, fraught process, and I made lots of choices that I immediately had second thoughts about. Like cutting Grover Washington Jr. to make way for the Trammps, or leaving Sister Sledge or Jazmine Sullivan or personal favorites like Go To Blazes off the list. Or including the Soul Survivors’ “Expressway To Your Heart” but leaving “I-76” by G. Love & Special Sauce parked on the side of the road.

Were those stupid decisions? Possibly. So this list that follows — 25 more essential songs of Philadelphia — is a chance to make room for those shoulda-coulda selections and bring the total number up to a more reasonable 101. Which, quite frankly, will still be an inadequate number for any true Philly music lover.

Some ground rules: Artists who were included in the original 76 were ineligible this time. So while the initial list featured the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers,” I ruled out another undeniably iconic O’Jays song, “For the Love of Money,” to make way for other artists.

And I didn’t consider holiday songs, which belong in a separate category. So apologies to the Philly Specials’ “Fairytale of Philadelphia” and Alan Mann’s “Christmas on the Block.”

Also, these songs are numbered in reverse, but I thought of them more as a playlist than a worst-to-first ranking. They’re all worthy additions to the original 76.

The Fugees are not a Philly band — they’re from Haiti and North Jersey. But the hip-hop trio of Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Pras Michel recorded for Ruffhouse Records, the Conshohocken label founded by Chris Schwartz and Joe “The Butcher” Nicolo, which also released Hill’s 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, as well as albums by Cypress Hill, Kris Kross, and Ben Arnold. “Ready or Not,” from the Fugees’ 1996 album The Score, represents Ruffhouse because its chorus is based on a Philly soul classic, the Delfonics’ “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” written by William Hart and Thom Bell.

“Sailing to Philadelphia” is a song about surveyors. Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler was making his way through Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon, about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the Englishmen who drew the boundary line that became recognized as the U.S.’s free states and slave states when he wrote what he once called a “two-minute take on a two-ton book.” (The lovely narrative ballad, which is a duet with James Taylor and the title cut of Knopfler’s 2000 album, is actually five and a half minutes long.)

Philly’s favorite convenience store and the Jersey Shore, all in one song title? Indie rock harpist Mary Lattimore’s sparkling, transporting instrumental was inspired by a Wawa steps away from the beach on Long Beach Island.

The lead track from the Lansdale-born band The Wonder Years’ 2011 album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing reps Philadelphia’s central role in this century’s pop-punk and emo scene, which includes bands like Modern Baseball, Algernon Cadwallader, and Marietta.

Singer Dan “Soupy” Campbell is frank about struggling with his mental health on the song’s coda, repeated three times: “I came out swinging from a South Philly basement, caked in stale beer and sweat under half-lit fluorescents,” Campbell sings (and shouts). “And I spent the winter writing songs about getting better, well, if I’m being honest, I’m getting there.”

To be honest, I didn’t like this song by the Philly band led by Alec Ounsworth when it came out in 2005. There’s the unappealing title, and I never understood the Talking Heads comparisons, other than a vocal similarity to David Byrne.

But with its driving, hypnotic rhythm, it’s aged well and is a great example of a Philly band at the center of a moment in music history. It’s a “blog-rock” success story from a time when the internet seemed like a wide-open, not malignant place. Bands like CYHSY could make their music available for free download on MP3 blogs and create a buzz that spread like wildfire, resulting in a career still going strong two decades later. Those were the days.

Hard-hitting Philly roots-rockers Go To Blazes made a series of bruising blues- and country-infused albums in the 1990s, each one marked by high-quality songwriting by singer Ted Warren and guitarist Tom Heyman that, in retrospect, was ahead of the Americana boom to come. This swaggering song from 1996’s Eric “Roscoe” Ambel-produced Waiting Around for the Crash faces the day after a restless night: “I can’t sleep, for the things I have done.”

Written by 2026 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Linda Creed — who died of cancer months before the song’s 1986 release — “Old Friend” is a melancholy ballad by the statuesque Philly soul singer on her first album for Philadelphia International Records. A modest hit, it became a sentimental fan favorite, particularly after Hyman’s death in 1995 at age 45.

With his kiss curl and clean-cut image, Bill Haley presented as more palatable to middle America than subversive 1950s sorts like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. But that doesn’t mean Haley didn’t have a sizable pop-cultural impact. With 1954’s “Rock Around The Clock,” which was written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers, the singer and bandleader who transitioned from Western swing to rock and roll and grew up in Boothwyn in Delaware County, scored the first rock-and-roll song to top the pop charts in both the U.S. and the U.K.

My first exposure to this Gamble and Huff composition with a lead vocal by Sheila Ferguson and support from Fayette Pinkney and Valerie Holiday came from an episode of the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son in which the Philly soul vocal trio guest-starred as themselves. Another fun fact: In the ‘70s, the Three Degrees were the favorite group of the now-king, Charles III and performed at his 30th birthday party at Buckingham Palace in 1978 when he was known only as Prince Charles.

Hard-bop saxophonist Golson — with a band that included his fellow Philly natives Percy Heath, Lee Morgan, Ray Bryant, and Philly Joe Jones — paid tribute to Delaware trumpeter Clifford Brown, who died in a car accident in Pennsylvania in 1956 at 25. The song has been covered by dozens of artists, including Ray Charles and Sonny Rollins.

Philly DJ, producer and Blacktronika professor King Britt put his own 1990s house music spin on classic Philly soul with his Sylk 130 project. Jafar Barron’s haunting trumpet and Vicki Miles’ seductive vocal add a touch of class.

Yes, Michael Jackson recorded in Philadelphia. In the years between the Motown era with the Jackson 5 and his partnership with Quincy Jones, Michael and his brothers recorded as the Jacksons at Sigma Sound Studios on both 1976’s The Jacksons and 1977’s Goin’ Places. On the former, the songs were written by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. The upbeat “Enjoy Yourself” was the biggest hit from the Jacksons’ Philly years, and the one song from the era that points forward to the unstoppable alchemy that Michael and Jones would find starting with Off the Wall in 1979.

Norristown native Jimmy Smith revolutionized the Hammond B-3 organ as an instrument central to jazz and was the leading light of the long lineage of Philly organists, that includes Shirley Scott, Charles Earland, Jimmy McGriff, Trudy Pitts, and Papa John DeFrancesco and Joey DeFrancesco.

“Walk on the Wild Side” is not the Lou Reed song. It’s an instrumental version of the Brook Benton song from a 1962 film noir. Later that year, Smith — whose music would later be sampled by hip-hop artists including the Beastie Boys, Nas, and Gang Starr — scored an unlikely hit from his album Bashin’: The Unpredictable Jimmy Smith.

A 1962 dance-craze song by Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe that borrowed from the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman.” The Orlons sang backup vocals on the No. 1 hit from the American Bandstand era, when Philadelphia was the center of the pop music industry until Dick Clark moved the show to California in 1963.

Nina Simone grew up in North Carolina as Eunice Waymon, the name she went by when she moved to West Philadelphia in 1950 with a plan to study at the Curtis Institute of Music. Her application was denied, which she attributed to racism, a characterization the Curtis and many historians have disputed.

But her failure to gain acceptance spurred reinvention: She adopted the stage name Nina Simone while playing piano and singing at the Mid-Town Bar & Grill in Atlantic City. A great career as an artist and civil rights activist followed. There are many songs to choose from — “Sinnerman,” “Feeling Good”— but I’m going with her most urgent and arresting, written in part as a response to the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963.

It might not be the best advice, but it does rhyme: “If you want to get downtown real quick, the only way to go is I-76.” Garrett Dutton’s ode to the Schuylkill Expressway from the hip-hop bluesman’s 1997 album Yeah, It’s That Easy includes shout-outs to Sixers players and mascot from the 1983 championship year: “Big Shot, and Mo Cheeks and Moses Malone / Julius Erving called Philly his home.”

A ripping power-pop masterwork that showcases the magnetism of Richard Bush, the lead singer of the A’s, the New Wave-era band that energized the Philly club scene before breaking up in 1982. One of two killer A’s singles written by Bush — who performs locally with his band the Peace Creeps — and songwriting partner Rocco Notte, along with “A Woman’s Got the Power.”

“Gonna Take A Miracle” is a case study in how Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, Thom Bell, and Sigma Sound Studios founder Joe Tarsia turned Philadelphia into a music mecca in the early 1970s.

Nyro was a New York songwriter three albums into her career when she came to Sigma Sound in 1971 to record an album of cover songs with LaBelle — the trio of Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash, who would explode in popularity with “Lady Marmalade” three years later.

The Gonna Take a Miracle album was produced by Gamble and Huff, and featured the MFSB Sigma house band, with horn and string arrangements by Bell and Bobby Martin. And the title cut, originally a hit for the Royalettes in 1965, is cowritten by Teddy Randazzo, one of Bell’s musical heroes.

For their 2010 collaborative album Wake Up!, mostly made up of covers of socially conscious R&B songs, Penn grad Legend and the Philly hip-hop band picked a winner. Sure, Legend isn’t equal to Teddy Pendergrass, who sang the original version of the John Whitehead-, Gene McFadden- and Victor Carstarphen-penned title cut from Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ 1975 album. But then, who is?

Swoony street corner harmony from 1963, written by Tymes singers George Williams and Roy Straigis with producer Billy Jackson, who voices the spoken intro. A hit on the Cameo-Parkway label in pre-Beatles doo-wop era, it was later a hit for R&B vocal group All-4-One in 1993.

Along with the Hooters and Tommy Conwell & the Young Rumblers — whose “I’m Not Your Man” is a near miss on this list — Robert Hazard was one of the most-likely-to-succeed faces of Philadelphia rock in the 1980s. The son of a Philadelphia Opera Company tenor wrote and recorded “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” in 1979, four years before Cyndi Lauper turned it into a megahit. Hazard was in heavy rotation on FM stations WMMR and WYSP with this echoey electro-pop hit and “Change Reaction,” from his self-titled 1982 EP.

“Just The Two of Us,” Washington’s 1980 team-up with Bill Withers, was the much bigger hit. Will Smith repurposed it for a different song of the same name on 1997’s Big Willie Style. And “Mister Magic,” the nine-minute jazz-R&B jam that’s the title cut from his 1975 album is another Grover contender. But I’m going to go geographical on this smooth-jazz mood piece from the Philly saxophonist, who cruised down what is now Kelly Drive on his 1981 album Come Morning.

“You couldn’t find room for Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” on a list of 76 songs?” was a refrain I heard in various forms. In excluding it I might have given too much weight to the fact that “We Are Family” became closely associated with Pittsburgh after the Pirates used it as their theme song on the way to winning the World Series in 1979.

In any case, “We Are Family” endures, well beyond its origins as a 1979 disco hit that was the first song penned by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards outside of their own band, Chic. Kathy Sledge delivered a stirring version of it with the Roots at the One Philly concert on the Ben Franklin Parkway on July 4, and just the other night, I heard it at a Phillies game.

Frankie Beverly grew up in Germantown and didn’t hit his stride as a purveyor of smooth, sensual soul music until moving to San Francisco in the 1970s. Over time, songs like “Joy & Pain” and “Before I Let Go,” sung by Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts’ favorite musician became essential to Black culture, as “the soundtrack of cookouts and summer music fests … and that kind of bliss that is sweet and peaceful,” as novelist S.A. Cosby put it when Beverly died in 2024. Beyoncé covered “Before I Let Go” at Coachella in 2018, and Questlove has called the song “the happiest breakup song ever” and “the national anthem.”

The standout track from Sullivan’s 2021 tour de force Heaux Tales is full of the soaring, swooping vocal runs and staccato syncopations. Along with other hits like “Bust Your Windows,” it demonstrates why Sullivan is the premier contemporary embodiment of the grand Philly soul tradition of great vocalists like Patti LaBelle, Teddy Pendergrass, and Russell Thompkins Jr.