Steppin' Out (Gonna Boogie Tonight)
Tony Orlando and Dawn's Vaudevillian experimentation
Don’t worry about me Ma
I’ll be alright
I’m steppin’ out
I’m gonna boogie tonight (dancing and singing)
These lyrics popped into my head last week and I desperately searched to remember who did the song. It brings back memories of being in the car with my family, the song blaring from CFRB. Tony Orlando and Dawn were incredibly popular and the station played them a lot. My mom like their music and my dad liked Dawn.
It comes off the album Dawn’s New Ragtime Follies, which was a concept album that combined Ragtime with pop/disco. This song, along with the other big hits on the album, were written by the songwriting team of Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown. They wrote pretty much all the Tony Orlando and Dawn hits along with some other artists of the early 70s.
And that’s all I can find about the song. It’s sad how all these easy-listening songs have disappeared. What will happen to them when my generation is gone?
What an interesting concept album! Can you imagine anyone attempting a vaudeville album today?! I remember liking this song when it was released along with the album's other two big hits "Say Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose" and "Who's in the Strawberry Patch with Sally?" The group was really on a roll having commercial success with a sound so outside of what we think about 1970s music today!
Did you know Tony Orlando was an early-'60s Brill Building songwriter before Clive Davis gave him an exec-type job at CBS' publishing arm in the late-'60s? What an amazing career....even before the Dawn years!