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“I Think We’re Alone Now” is a song written and composed by Ritchie Cordell that was first recorded by Tommy James and the Shondells. It was a major hit for the group, reaching number 4 on the US Hot 100 in April 1967. It finished at No. 12 on Billboard magazine’s year-end singles chart for 1967.

The song has been covered several times by other artists, most notably by Tiffany in 1987. The Tiffany recording reached number 1 on the charts of various countries including the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand. Other cover versions have also charted, including those by the Rubinoos (number 45 US, 1977) and Girls Aloud (number 4 UK, 2006).

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June is National Candy Month. This sweet tooth filler dates back to cavemen who ate honey combs and honey. It can be traced as far back as 1500 BC to the ancient Egyptians who used honey and made candy by adding figs, nuts, dates and spices.

From 1492 to 1930 when more than 60 million Europeans migrated to the American continent, they brought with them their recipes for confections.

The earliest form of sweets was rather simple, often combining boiled sugar, molasses, and honey with added dried fruits. As our 13 original colonies grew and sugar became more accessible, small-scale confectioners began appearing. The first commercially sold candy, “the Gibralter,” was a hard candy sold on the steps of Salem, Massachusetts’s first church. The candy quickly became popular, paving the way for the addition of more commercially made candies.

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Workers dredging the Savannah River expected to find mud, but instead uncovered 19 massive cannons that had been hidden beneath the water since the American Revolutionary War.

Recovered between 2021 and 2022, the weapons each weighed more than 1,000 pounds and had rested on the riverbed for nearly 250 years. Some were still loaded, suggesting they sank with a British ship deliberately scuttled in 1779 to block the advancing French fleet during the Siege of Savannah.

After years of conservation at Texas A&M, 17 restored cannons will go on public display for the first time on July 2, 2026, offering one of the most remarkable Revolutionary War discoveries ever made in Georgia and preserving a forgotten chapter of American history.

Credit: Savannah District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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The original version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was written and recorded by Bob Dylan. It was released in 1973 as part of the soundtrack for the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

The song was written specifically for a poignant scene in the movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, where a mortally wounded frontier sheriff (played by Slim Pickens) lays dying by a river. Characterized by its haunting simplicity, it features just two short verses expressing the regret of a lawman wanting to lay down his badge and guns.

Despite being a relatively simple track, it became one of Dylan’s most celebrated global hits. Over the years, it has been heavily covered by artists like Guns N’ Roses, Eric Clapton, and Randy Crawford.

“Mama, take this badge off of me”  is a dying lawman’s plea to his wife. The “badge” represents his role, duty, and authority as a sheriff. By asking his wife to take it off, he means he is dying, giving up his life of violence, and surrendering his duty because he can no longer fight.

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“From a Distance” is a song by American singer-songwriter Julie Gold, initially penned in 1985.   Gold’s friend Christine Lavin introduced the song to Nanci Griffith, who first recorded it for her 1987 album Lone Star State of Mind. A successful cover version by Bette Midler was released in 1990. Kathy Mattea released a cover of it on her 1991 album Time Passes By.

Julie Gold has stated that she believes in an immanent and beneficent God, and also thinks that people have a right to interpret the song any way they want, as with all art.   She has stated that the song is about the difference between how things appear to be and how they really are.

“From a Distance” became an international commercial success after it was covered by American singer Bette Midler for her seventh studio album, Some People’s Lives (1990). World events at this time gave the song a resonance as an anthem during the Gulf War.  It reached number one on the US Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and number two on both the Cash Box Top 100 and Billboard Hot 100 charts.   The song went on to win a Grammy for Song of the Year (for Julie Gold) in 1991 and a “3 Million Airs Award” from Broadcast Music Incorporated. The song also reached the top 10 in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand. In the United Kingdom, the song peaked at number six following a re-release in 1991, having originally failed to make the top 40 when released concurrently with Cliff Richard‘s version.

Midler re-recorded a Christmas edition for her 2006 Christmas album, Cool Yule, with additional lyrics by Los Angeles native Jay Landers. Additional recordings of the original have been performed by Gold, Griffith, Simon Nicol (of Fairport Convention) and many others.

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“Mack the Knife” or “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” (German: “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer”) is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their 1928 music drama The Threepenny Opera (German: Die Dreigroschenoper). The song tells of a knife-wielding criminal of the London underworld named Macheath, the “Mack the Knife” of the title.

The song has become a popular standard recorded by many artists after it was recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1955 with translated lyrics by Marc Blitzstein. The most popular version of the song was by Bobby Darin in 1959, whose recording became a number one hit in the US and UK and earned him two Grammys at the 2nd Annual Grammy Awards. Ella Fitzgerald also received a Grammy for her performance of the song in 1961.

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“The Ballad of the Green Berets” is a 1966 patriotic song co-written and performed by Barry Sadler, in the style of a ballad about the United States Army Special Forces. It was one of the few popular songs of the Vietnam War years to cast the military in a positive light.

The song became a major hit in January 1966, reaching number one for five weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, and was ranked number one of that chart’s most successful songs of 1966. It was also a crossover hit, reaching number one on Billboard‘s Easy Listening chart and number two on Billboard‘s Country survey. “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was the most commercially successful topical song of the Vietnam War era.

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“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is a folk song written by American singer-songwriter Pete Seeger in 1955. Inspired lyrically by the traditional Cossack folk song “Koloda-Duda”, Seeger borrowed an Irish melody for the music and published the first three verses in Sing Out! magazine.  Additional verses were added in May 1960 by Joe Hickerson, who turned it into a circular song.  Its rhetorical “where?” and meditation on death place the song in the ubi sunt tradition.  In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of its selections of the “Top 20 Political Songs”.

The 1962 album version of the song was released as part of the Columbia Records Hall of Fame 45 single series in 1965 as 13–33088.  The recording of the song by Pete Seeger was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002 in the Folk category with the release year given as 1964 as a Columbia Records single.

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These Mondays are going by way too fast!

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“We Will Rock You” is a song by the British rock band Queen from their 1977 album News of the World, written by guitarist Brian May.  Rolling Stone ranked it number 330 of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” in 2004,  and the RIAA it placed at number 146 on the Songs of the Century list in 2001. In 2009, “We Will Rock You” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Other than the last 30 seconds, which contains a guitar solo by May, the song is generally set in a cappella form, using only stomping and clapping as a rhythmic body percussion beat. In 1977, “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” were issued together as a worldwide top 10 single.   Soon after the album was released, many radio stations played the songs consecutively, without interruption.

Since its release, “We Will Rock You” has been covered, remixed, sampled, parodied, referred to, and used by multiple recording artists, TV shows, films and other media worldwide.  It has also become a popular stadium anthem at sports events around the world, mostly due to its simple rhythm.  On 7 October 2017, Queen released a Raw Sessions version of the track to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of News of the World. It features a radically different approach to the guitar solo and includes May’s count-in immediately prior to the recording.

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“Islands in the Stream” is a song written by the Bee Gees and recorded by American country music artists Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. It was released in August 1983 as the first single from Rogers’s fifteenth studio album Eyes That See in the Dark. The Bee Gees released a live version in 1998 and a studio version in 2001.

The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States, giving each of Rogers and Parton their second pop number-one hit (after Rogers’s “Lady” in 1980 and Parton’s “9 to 5” in 1981). It also topped the Country and Adult Contemporary charts. In 2005 the song topped Country Music Television‘s poll of the best country duets of all time; Parton and Rogers reunited to perform the song on a CMT special. As of May 2023, it has been triple certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for three million certified units.

Named after the 1970 novel by Ernest Hemingway, the song was originally written for Diana Ross in an R&B style but later reworked for the duet by Rogers and Parton.

It has been claimed that the song was also intended for Marvin Gaye. This is attributed to a 2001 Good Morning America interview with the Bee Gees. When Barry Gibb said the song was written for Ross, Robin Gibb interrupted and said, “No, we wrote it for Marvin Gaye … We sent it to him but he was dead so it was a bit difficult for him to sing it.”  Gaye actually died in 1984, a year after the recording.  Separately, Robin Gibb has said the song was stylistically written “… as a Tamla kind of soul song in a Marvin Gaye type feel”, though not asserting it was for Gaye.  In other interviews, Barry Gibb has always maintained that Ross was the original artist for the song with no mention of Gaye.

For licensing reasons, the song was not included on the digital release of Eyes That See in the Dark from Capitol Records Nashville. Sony Music, the current owner of RCA Records, protected copyrights in the recording, which is digitally available only in various compilations from Sony Music, especially those of Dolly Parton.