The other 7 were all top 20 near miss songs. For Part 3, read The 40 Greatest Animated TV Series Theme Songs. our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. Not bad, considering the band was actually birthed in the bars of a snowy Buffalo, NY! I’m only bothering with the TV version, which forgoes the rather bleak lyrics written by Mike Altman. MP3 Music Listen with Music Unlimited. And yet composer Arthur Smith, who helped invent rock guitar with 1948's hit "Guitar Boogie," didn't get credit for his original—not until he sued the producers, anyway. An iconic 80’s TV show with an iconic theme song. Here are the 50 best TV theme songs as determined by Paste writers and staffers. One good example is the theme from the popular series Love Boat, which contributed to the show’s success. A good concept for a collection, one that will appeal to many rock listeners, although this is mostly not rock. Featuring a male-female duo of vocalists on only a few crucial, almost haiku-like lines ("Trying hard now! By Jason Bailey. The vocal version (called "Speak Softly Love") was also on the movie soundtrack album and also pulled as a single, performed by Andy Williams in his inimitable style. The ragtime piece "The Entertainer" was adapted by Marvin Hamlisch and served as the theme for the movie The Sting. ... YouTube Sensation Keenan Cahill Talks "Hands Up" & New Original Songs… Taxi. 5. Lush postwar pop had already started to pass out of vogue by the time the '70s started, but it lingered on in old-fashioned haunts such as movie soundtracks, TV themes, classical and traditional folk music. The most inevitable song on this list. Retro synth and organ stand out from the instrumental morass. Before we get into it, I did have to set some qualifications: a lot of shows began in the 70s and ended in the 80s, or began in the 80s and ended in the 90s. At the same time, jazz fusion and mainstream funk were getting lighter and airier, becoming the perfect metaphorical soundtrack for aging boomers who found that rock has just gotten too wild. It's instantly recognizable to this day as the theme to the long-running ABC soap The Young and the Restless, although it started life as an instrumental called "Cotton's Dream," composed for the movie soundtrack of the 1971 nature drama Bless the Beasts and Children. For Part 2, read The 25 Greatest TV Theme Songs of All Time: Spoken-Word. LiveAbout uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. 15 best instrumental songs of the 1950s and 1960s. The song that more or less invented the musical montage, "Gonna Fly Now" also blurred the line, once and for all, between the pop movie soundtrack and the very specific jazz-based brand of "action funk" that had defined the '70s. Theme' Track: 'H.K. 12 of these were top 20 songs. The Best and Worst Instrumental TV Themes ... TV theme songs, of course! instrumentals, movie themes, & tv themes from the 60s and 70s it also defined strength training fantasies until a slew of cheesy sequels and knockoffs rendered the very concept hopelessly dated. 99. ... and one of the best instrumental themes of all time. 18 pop-soul best instrumental songs of the 1960s. Strauss' spacey magnum opus also helped define the first decade of space exploration ever since its inclusion in the movie soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and eventual adaption into the equally bizarre and grandiose '70s stage show of one Elvis Presley. 18 best instrumental songs of the 1960s. Great for detective films or caper story, investigation and spy. This is a valiant effort to compile the very best hour long TV themes and theme songs from the classic television shows of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. 100 Greatest TV Theme Songs by GreggEns | created - 17 Aug 2012 | updated - 23 Aug 2013 | Public These are the 100 theme songs that have the right mix of excellence, memorability, and relevance. ... That lyrical version opens the Altman film, but the rendition which opens TV show is instrumental … These 5 Best TV Theme Songs of the 70s benefit from the folksy individualism of the era and are distinctly warm in their analog-itude. In fact, his version was a bigger hit at the time, but it's the weepy accordions (!) That flute haunted my evenings as a … But things were a little bit different in the 70s. Listen to 110 Instrumental Hits of the 50s & 60s by Various Artists on Apple Music. 14 of these best instrumentals are original top 20 hits listed here. If his sound seems somewhat familiar, it's because he helped turn funk fiends Kool and the Gang into smooth pop stars a few years later with hits like "Ladies Night.". TV's 20 Best Instrumental Theme Songs. Quincy Jones was kickin' it with "The Streetbeater," the theme for Sanford & Son, as were John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful with the Welcome Back Kotter theme, Henry Mancini with the song of note for Charlie's Angels, Mike Post with The Rockford Files, the Brady Bunch with, well, The Brady Bunch theme, and, of course, the Banana Splits with "The Tra-La-La Song." And each came with a super-catchy earworm of a theme song. 18 best instrumental songs of the 1970s. Robert Fontenot Jr. is an entertainment critic and journalist focusing on classic rock and roll and published nationally for more than 25 years. It's still more or less Philadelphia's unofficial theme song, thanks to Sly's low-budget cinematic triumph. by Brian Galindo. 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