Some songs go to the top of the charts because they’re good. Other songs become hits because…well, nobody really knows why. “Disco Duck,” which spent a week at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in Oct. 1976, falls into the latter category.
The novelty track, once voted the “Worst Song of the 1970s” by Rolling Stone readers, was written and performed by Memphis DJ Rick Dees. It’s possible that the song got super popular because listeners thought they were listening to a song about Donald Duck at the disco. After all, the lyrics are about a duck who just can’t help but disco dance, and the track features a duck voice that sounds just like the Disney character.
Actually, though, Dees was inspired to write the song when he was working out at the gym and heard a guy doing a duck voice. The DJ was so impressed, he wrote “Disco Duck” with the man in mind, then hired him to do the voice, according to Stereogum.
Dees didn’t expect “Disco Duck” to take off the way it did, nor did he expect to get fired from his DJ job as a result. According to The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, the radio station he worked for, WMPS, wouldn’t allow him to play the song on the air because management was worried about potentially violating FCC conflict-of-interest rules. Dees didn’t play “Disco Duck,” but he did mention on the air that it was about to go to #1…and that was enough to get him canned.
Luckily, Dees got hired by another radio station and was free to ride the “Disco Duck” wave, performing on shows like American Bandstand (a surreal spectacle involving a duck puppet) and The Midnight Special. Unluckily, “Disco Duck” would be the last hit for Dees. (His follow up song, “Dis-Gorilla,” was about a disco dancing gorilla.)
Alas, while many one-hit wonders have stood the test of time over the years, “Disco Duck” can’t really make that claim.
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“If ‘Disco Duck’ belongs to a musical tradition, it isn’t disco,” music journalist Tom Breihan wrote.
“It’s the novelty song, the fading art form that was huge in the late ’50s and early ’60s but dying out by the mid-’70s,” Breihan continued. “It’s possible that ‘Disco Duck’ is the last true novelty to hit #1. There are plenty of later hits that you could call novelties — and many that I will almost certainly call novelties in this column — but they’re not novelties of the Ray Stevens/”Chipmunk Song” variety. They’re songs that are intended to work as pieces of music, however silly. ‘Disco Duck’ merely exists as a vehicle for that duck voice.”
As for the man behind the duck voice, Kenneth Pruitt, after going to great lengths to help promote “Disco Duck” (appearing on TV shows wearing a duck costume, etc.), he ended up suing Dees for allegedly paying him just $188.
Sometimes showbiz ain’t all it’s quacked up to be.
Related: This ‘Absolutely Terrible’ Chart-Topper Was Voted ‘Worst Song of the ’60s’