This article was written in February, 2011, in response to an NPR feature on Etta James' "At Last" and the state of current songwriting that had run several weeks earlier. As fans and industryites mourn James, who died Jan. 20, we revisited the topic. The original article is followed by new comments.

It is an ongoing trope among industry people: the classic song that couldn’t be a hit on today’s radio, amidst all the implied rubbish that radio plays now. One of ROR’s first e-mails was from a reader suggested just that about “Stairway To Heaven.” And right before New Years’ Day, NPR’s “All Things Considered” undertook a similar discussion about “At Last,” the standard known to most of us through Etta James’ 1961 interpretation.

NPR reported that Onerepublic leader/hit songwriter Ryan Tedder has become a fan of Sirius XM’s 40s on 4 channel. Tedder is enamored of the “soul” of the Great American Songbook but despairing of the likelihood of anything like “At Last” becoming a hit today. “It’s too musical. It doesn’t have an 808 drum kit behind it, and it’s not programmed to be playing in a club,” he told NPR.

Other present hitmakers pile on, and not just about the standards. “Rude Boy”/”Love The Way You Lie” writer Makeba Riddick can’t imagine “Thriller” on the radio today. Evan Bogart, co-author of “S.O.S.,” thinks even that Rihanna song couldn’t be a hit, four years later. “Hips Don’t Lie” writer/Fugees collaborator Jerry Wonder believes that in this era of “a whole new sonic” that “there is no hit song from the past that you could release right now and have it go to number one.” Indeed, remakes are scarce and even samples have lost some of their novelty. The Black Eyed Peas did far better by capturing a sense of ’80s music on “I Gotta Feeling” than by actually interpolating it on “The Time (The Dirty Bit).”

The irony is that whatever the prospects for “At Last” in 2011, the Etta James version was hardly a smash in 1961. “At Last” got to No. 2 R&B, but only to No. 47 on the pop side. (In turn, Glenn Miller’s 1942 original had gone only to No. 14.) That so many listeners today are familiar with the song is the result of multiple media placements. (There’s another one coming in the Justin Bieber concert film, “Never Say Never,” where “At Last” plays in a tribute to Bieber’s hair!) Indeed, from Billy & the Beaters’ “At This Moment” to Christina Perri’s current “Jar Of Hearts,” if a song’s appeal is that it brought the radio to a halt, chances are excellent that it didn’t actually start on the radio.

“At Last” is also one of those songs whose endurance is perhaps due to the fact that most people never heard it pounded on the radio. It’s hard to imagine a time when “Stairway To Heaven” wasn’t the poster child for Classic Rock overexposure, but much of its cult developed as a result of never being a hit single. Top 40 stations envying AOR’s ’70s hipness picked it up at different times in different markets. (I remember hearing it on the request countdown on WIBG Philadelphia in 1977.)

And, then, of course, there’s evidence that “At Last” actually was a hit in this era. Nielsen Soundscan shows that Beyoncé’s remake from the “Cadillac Records” soundtrack has sold over 191,400 digital downloads to date while the soundtrack album has sold over 184,200 units. Again, the exposure was mostly off the air—the 2009 inauguration and a movie that wasn’t a smash—but there was Urban AC and AC airplay. More significantly, James’ own version has sold over 1,256,900 digital downloads since 2003, despite meager airplay on a handful of Jammin’ Oldies and a few still-extant Smooth Jazz stations.

That’s the same “what is a hit” question raised repeatedly by the “Glee” Cast singles, Cee-Lo’s
“F—- You” and others. Is Green’s single finally “a hit” now that some radio stations are going back to play it again? Or has its two rounds of viral exposure made it a hit from the beginning that some stations are now acknowledging? For that matter, are remakes really dead, or is “Glee” giving us numerous hit remakes every week?

And if remakes are a challenge, retro-sounding records are abundant, in defiance, thus far, of Wonder’s “whole new sonic” prediction. Even Ke$ha’s “We R What We R” throws back to early ’90s techno. We now have interpolations of interpolations. Pitbull’s “Hey Baby (Drop It To The Floor)” invokes Salt-N-Pepa’s 1987 “Push It,” which itself channeled the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” from 23 years earlier. Then there’s R. Kelly’s recent Urban AC hit, “When A Woman Loves,” which throws “At Last” in a blender with the Impressions’’ “For Your Precious Love” and the operatic Jackie Wilson hits from the same era.

Meanwhile, an atmosphere of tighter playlists, fewer heroic MDs, and minute-by-minute ratings scrutiny makes it difficult for any “different” sounding record to break through, which makes the industry less likely to serve Top 40 radio truly new sonics. Even in 1961, James followed up the R&B success of “At Last” with another standard, “Trust In Me.” But any wisdom about what can become a hit deserves constant scrutiny and revision. It hasn’t been that long since most A&R people would have been reluctant to release a 125 b.p.m. record into a stream of steady-and-slower hits engineered for those who would rather nod their head to the music than dance.

“At Last” has a pretty safe place in the celestial jukebox these days. So the real question here is always could a song like it become a hit today. Ballads, once the sure-fire clean-up single that cemented the success of an artist or project, face more resistance at radio today. In recent months, the advantage has almost been with songs like “The Only Exception” or “Jar Of Hearts” whose courtliness is almost a novelty.

That said, perhaps the only thing the traditional pop ballad needed was for Taylor Swift to release “Back To December.” Classic sounds and new sounds both have a complicated and always changing industry landscape to negotiate on their way to an audience, which often proves not to be hung up about them at all.

Update: January 23, 2012

I was wrong about "Back To December," which hit the same ballad blockade that snagged previous slower songs in the lower reaches of the top 10 (or further down). Instead, it was Adele's (appropriately bluesy) "Somebody Like You" and Bruno Mars' "It Will Rain" that brought the ballad back to Top 40 prominence. The latter, coincidentally, becomes the first ballad No. 1 in several years at Mainstream CHR today.

As for James, "At Last" was in the top 5 of iTunes track sales over the weekend (it's now top 20), while her "The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection" remains a top 5 selling album. And while one always wishes that artists didn't have to achieve that success posthumously, there were more than a million recent purchasers of "At Last" before James' death.

There's not much likelihood that "At Last" will resurface on pop radio in a regular way in the next few weeks. We already know that Top 40 didn't return to "Rehab" after Amy Winehouse's death. So far, the bulk of the recent NielsenBDS monitored airplay for "At Last" is at the Jammin' Oldies and Urban AC stations that were its biggest supporters already.

But James does end her career as the voice of Flo Rida's "Good Feeling" and Avicii's "Levels." And the James song whose intro made those hits possible, "Something's Got A Hold On Me," was recently performed on "American Idol," so it would be nice to see James multiply represented in pop culture.

For any Oldies or Urban AC station that did want to give James' 50-year-career its due beyond one song, there are other options as well, that already have some hook or recognition with the audience:

"Tell Mama" – The aggressive 1968 update of her sound that gave James a second run at R&B radio;

"I Just Want To Make Love To You" – It's from the same album as "At Last." It's known to rock audiences (of a certain age, anyway) because of Foghat's mid-'70s version. But her version of the Willie Dixon/Muddy Waters standard demonstrated its currency by becoming a British top 40 hit in the '90s after being used in a TV spot.

"You Can Leave Your Hat On" – The Joe Cocker version is a secret weapon for Triple-A and even some AC stations. She recorded it in the mid-'70s. There's also a James version of "Piece Of My Heart" from a few years later.

"Seven Day Fool" — Most U.S. audiences won't know it. But in Canada, it's familiar due to a straight-ahead 2008 remake by Jully Black that was an across-the-board Mainstream CHR/Hot AC/AC hit there.