The hirsute singer-songwriter Paul Davis had a half dozen Top 10 hits on the Adult Contemporary chart, but only one Top 10 on the Hot 100: “I Go Crazy,” which reached #7 and, strangely enough, didn’t reach the Top 10 on the AC chart (#25). For a while, it held the record for most weeks (40) on the Hot 100 chart. Casey Kasem said Davis presented it to his record company, begging to have Lou Rawls record it, believing Lou could make it a hit. When they saw how much faith had in the song, they cleaned up his demo and released it himself. I’d have loved to hear Chicago’s own Lou Rawls sing it, but Paul’s version is superb.

From the 1965 album From All Sides, the trio and Bola Sete join forces again on “Ginza Samba,” another Guaraldi original. If you’ve enjoyed Vince Guaraldi this week, his 1980 collection Greatest Hits is a good investment, and it’s available on Spotify for streaming.

My introduction to Vince Guaraldi’s music was, as you probably know by now, the 1965 animated special A Charlie Brown Christmas, starring the characters from Charles M. Schulz’s popular Peanuts comic strip. One of the songs Guaraldi wrote was subsequently added to the score of all the Peanuts specials, “Linus & Lucy,” played when the blanket-toting Linus and his bossy fussbudget sister Lucy made their first appearance in the show. Those of you who have seen the specials know what I’m talking about. The Wikipedia article on the strip and the page on Don Markstein’s Toonopedia will give you some background if you aren’t.

Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete recorded three albums with the Vince Guaraldi Trio (Guaraldi, piano; Fred Marshall, bass; Jerry Granelli, drums) between 1963 and 1966. Here’s a video of an appearance they made on Jazz Casual, hosted by noted critic Ralph J. Gleason, in 1963. “Outra Vez” (“Again”) was written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and is a bossa nova standard.