KC & The Sunshine Band

This group come about in Miami, Florida, when Harry Wayne Casey was working in a record store as well as being a part-time employee at TK Records.

Harry, familiarly known as KC, put together a band of musicians that were active in the local Junkanoo music scene as well as some who worked in the studio of TK Records and names them KC & The Sunshine Junkanoo Band.

After a while KC met up with Richard Finch was working as an engineer at TK Records and they decided to go into collaboration as a song-writing and music team. They started out performing as a duo but before ling they were adding musicians from the studio to the line-up. These included Robert Johnson on drums and Jerome Smith on guitar.

They started making their own recordings for TK Records in 1973 using the revised band name of KC & The Sunshine Band and that same year they saw their single “Blow Your Whistle” entering music charts on a national and international level. They followed it with “Sound Your Funky Horn” in 1974 which brought them further chart success and they released their first album Do It Good.

Also in 1974 KC and Richard Finch had written the song “Rock Your Baby” which they were going to use themselves, but they passed it onto the singer George McCrae who recorded it and ended up topping the charts in no less than 51 countries. This became the Casey-Finch song-writing team’s first No. 1 hit.

In 1975 George McCrae sang with KC & The Sunshine Band as an un-credited vocalist on their song “Queen of Clubs”. The song reached No. 7 in the UK and they embarked on a tour there. The year was a very busy one for the band as they also released their second album which was self-titled which achieved triple platinum status and produced the No. 1 singles “Get Down Tonight” and “That’s the Way (I Like It)”. This paved the way to success at the 1976 Grammy Awards which was the same year they released Part 3 which gave them the No. 2 hit song “Keep It Comin’ Love” as well as the singles “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” and “I’m Your Boogie Man”.

In 1978 they released their Who Do Ya (Love) which didn’t provide the same success as their previous album releases but it still did manage to gain them a Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 hit with their cover of “It’s the Same Old Song” which had previously been a hit for The Four Tops.

The following year, in 1979, Do You Wanna Go Party was issued, from which “Please Don’t Go” was released as a single at the very end of the year and managed to achieve what would become their last No. 1 chart hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

The 1980s came around and even though they had had their No. 1 hit in the January of that year they could sense that with the changing musical interests and people gravitating away from disco and towards new wave they began looking at other musical styles. TK Records folded that same year and they signed a new contract with Epic.

1981 was not so successful for them at all when the albums Space Cadet: Solo Flight, which was only credited to KC, and The Painter were released with neither giving them an entry on the charts. Richard Finch and Harry Casey also decided to go their own ways.

The following year they released All in a Night’s Work, recorded before Finch and Casey’s split, which only charted at No. 38 in Australia but did provide them with the hit “Give It Up”, which made the No. 1 spot in the UK. 1982 was not an easy year for Harry Casey as he was paralysed in a head-on automobile crash which took him around nine months or more to recuperate from.

In 1984 the album KC Ten was released with the inclusion of “Give It Up” which had been on the previous album. Epic refused to re-release it as a single which resulted in Harry Casey establishing his own label called Meca Records and releasing it on that label in the U.S. and seeing it reaching the Top 40 in the US. However, in 1985, Casey decided to retire and the group went into a hiatus.

After the 1990s arrived Harry Casey decided to return to music and put the band back together with a completely new line-up, barring the percussionist. They went out on tour and in 1993 released their Oh Yeah on the XYZ label, a decade after their last studio album. For the rest of the 1990s their album output were two live albums which were the 1995 Get Down Live! and the 1998 Live: Get Down Tonight. Several compilations also appeared including their 1999 25^th Anniversary Collection.

Into the new millennium and they released the 2001 album I’ll Be There for You which was unsuccessful on the charts but generated critical acclaim. The group went on to pop up in the 2003 version of The In-Laws and Richard Finch came back to music as a producer in 2006. In 2009 the group made an appearance performing some of their hits at the IBN Impact Smart SOA Conference a month after Casey had performed on an episode of American Idol. IN 2011 they performed at the Liberty Bowl half-time show.

In 2013 Barry Manilow presented them with a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars and in 2016 they saw further chart success o the Billboard Dance Club Songs with “I’m Feeling You” in collaboration with Bimbo Jones.

The music of KC & The Sunshine Band is still regularly heard today as it appears on more than 200 movie soundtracks. They continue to give live performances and throughout their history have sold more than 100 million records and have their name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Sources:

KC & The Sunshine Band

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