Earlier today, I linked to an excerpt from a song and challenged you to guess what was familiar about the tune. Most of you probably got it, but for the benefit of those who didn't…
That was an excerpt from a song called "It's Really Love," which appeared on Annette Funicello's 1959 LP record, Annette Sings. It was written for her by Paul Anka, who was recycling a song he'd written years earlier called "Toot Sweet.
In 1962, shortly before Johnny Carson took over as host of The Tonight Show, he and his manager ran into Anka on 57th Street in New York. During a brief conversation, Carson happened to mention that he was looking for a theme song. Anka scurried off to come up with something and decided to reuse the tune one more time. He was doing work then at Bell Sound Studios and he put together a demo record there and shipped it off to Johnny, who by then was down in Florida for a combination vacation and strategy session. Carson heard the song and liked it, but ran into some opposition from his newly-chosen bandleader, Skitch Henderson. Apparently, Skitch was looking forward to writing a theme song and collecting the royalties every time it was played.
There are two versions of what happened next, depending on who you ask. One version is that Johnny insisted on Anka's song and, out of gratitude, Anka named it "Johnny's Song" and put Carson down as co-author, which meant that they split the royalties. The other version is the opposite: Anka named it that and designated Johnny as co-author so that Johnny would insist on that theme. Either way, it wound up being played to kick off every The Tonight Show for 30+ years. For each of those years, Anka and Carson split somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000. Not bad.