A brighter day written after the darkest one

Bobby Hebb grew up in Nashville with two blind parents who were both musicians. He and his older brother Harold worked as a song-and-dance team from the time Bobby was three. Later he played spoons and other instruments in Roy Acuff's band, sang backup on Bo Diddley's “Diddley Daddy”, played trumpet in a US Navy jazz band and took Mickey Baker's place in Mickey and Sylvia.

The song that made him began in bad days. On 23 November 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy's assassination, his brother Harold was killed in a knife fight outside a Nashville nightclub. Hebb was devastated by both and sought comfort in songwriting. Many say the song that followed was “Sunny”, though Hebb himself said otherwise. What he did say was that he wanted to think of happier times and look for a brighter day, a different approach to what Johnny Ray did in “Just Walkin' in the Rain”.

“Sunny” was recorded in New York City after demos with producer Jerry Ross, and released in 1966. It reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, number three on the R&B chart and number 12 in the UK. Hebb toured with The Beatles that year. BMI later put it at number 25 on its list of the top 100 songs of the century.

He had other songs, among them “A Satisfied Mind” and “Love Me”, and he wrote for others, including Lou Rawls' 1971 hit “A Natural Man”, co-written with comedian Sandy Baron. In 1976 he cut a disco version, “Sunny '76”. After a 35-year recording gap he returned in 2005 with That's All I Wanna Know, released in Europe.

Hebb died in 2010 at the age of 72 in his hometown of Nashville. “Sunny” has outlived him as one of the warmest songs to come out of a very cold winter.