There's Something on Your Mind

"There's Something on Your Mind (Part 2)" is a 1960 novelty song by Bobby Marchan. The single was Marchan's most successful release on both the R&B and pop singles chart. "There's Something on Your Mind" made it to number one on the R&B charts and number thirty-one on the Billboard Hot 100.^[1]

The song was originally recorded as "There Is Something on Your Mind" in 1957 by Big Jay McNeely and his band in a small Seattle recording studio, and leased more than a year later to Los Angeles disc jockey Hunter Hancock's Swingin' Records label, where it reached #42 on Billboard's pop chart and number 2 on the R&B chart in early 1959. The lead vocalist on this original recording was Little Sonny Warner. Though McNeely is listed as the song's writer, he has freely admitted that he purchased the song from the Rivingtons' vocalist John "Sonny" Harris, who in turn had lifted much of it from a gospel song, "Something on My Mind" by the Highway QCs.

The song has been recorded many times since then by Big Jay McNeely himself with various collaborators, along with Freddy Fender, B.B. King, Albert King, Etta James, Gene Vincent, Baby Lloyd Stallworth (of the Famous Flames), the Jolly Jacks (who parodied the violence of the Marchan recording), and others.

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