TIK TOK'S VIRAL HITS - Connie Francis - "Pretty Little Baby"

Welcome back to Hitmaker Chronicles! I'm your host, Garrett Fisher. Today we're exploring the most unlikely viral sensation of 2025 - a forgotten B-side from 1962 that gave an 87-year-old legend one final moment in the sun. We'll trace how Connie Francis' "Pretty Little Baby" went from one of 40 songs recorded in a marathon session to TikTok's #5 global Song of Summer, 63 years later. It's a story about time collapse, generational discovery, and the bittersweet beauty of a star taking her final bow just as the world remembered her name. Let's dive into this extraordinary resurrection.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Callaroga Shark Media, September twenty twenty five. I'm Garrett Fisher
and I need you to understand something about time. In
August nineteen sixty one, a twenty three year old Connie
Francis walked into MGM Records for what would become a

(00:25):
legendary marathon recording session four days forty songs, among them.
Buried somewhere in the middle of this exhausting sprint was
a twee little number called Pretty Little Baby, a song
so forgettable that Francis herself would later admit she had
to listen to it in twenty twenty five just to
remember she'd recorded it sixty three years. That's how long

(00:47):
it took for this song to matter, and when it
finally did, Connie Francis had about three months left to live.
The song was one of forty tracks Francis recorded during
those marathon four days in August nineteen six, eventually selected
for her nineteen sixty two album Connie Francis Singing Secondhand
Love and Other Hits. It was released as the B

(01:09):
side too I'm Going to Be Warm This Winter in
the UK, Norway, India, Denmark and South Africa. The Kiss
of death in the record business. B sides were where
songs went to be forgotten. To understand how extraordinary this
resurrection is, you need to understand who. Connie Francis was
born Conchetta Rosemarie Francnaro in Newark nineteen thirty seven. She

(01:33):
was groomed from childhood by her accordion playing father, George,
who controlled every aspect of her life with an iron fist.
When she fell in love with Bobby Darren in the
late nineteen fifties and rumors of marriage surfaced, her father
stormed into a rehearsal and pulled a gun on Darren,
ending the relationship. But professionally she was untouchable. Francis became

(01:55):
the first woman to reach number one one on the
Billboard Hot one hundred when and Everybody's Somebody's Full topped
the chart in nineteen sixty and was the most popular
female vocalist in the United States between nineteen fifty eight
and nineteen sixty four. She had the voice, the look,
the everything that pre Beatles America wanted. Dick Clark loved her.

(02:16):
She won Best Female Vocalist on American Bandstand for five
straight years. By the time Pretty Little Baby was recorded.
Francis was at her commercial peak, but already sensing the
winds changing. The British were coming, rock was getting harder.
The sweet innocent sound of you can ask the Flowers,
I sit for hours telling all the bluebirds was already

(02:39):
starting to sound like it belonged to another era, even
in nineteen sixty two, and then silence for sixty three years.
The resurrection began sometime in early twenty twenty five, as
it always does now, Accidentally, ironically, without any logic anyone
can explain, the song started averaging six hundred thousand and

(03:00):
plus daily creates on TikTok, with posts from Kim Kardashian
and Northwest Kylie Jenner, Brook Monk and others. Gen Z
and Jen Alfa were using this sugary, sweet nineteen sixty
two melody to soundtrack videos of their babies, their pets,
their vintage outfits. Nobody knew why this song. Why now?

(03:21):
The algorithm works in mysterious ways. Francis herself said, I
had to listen to it to identify it. Then, of
course I recognized the fact that I had done it
in seven languages. Imagine that, being eighty seven years old
in failing health and suddenly learning that a song you
forgot you recorded is being played eighty billion times by

(03:43):
children who weren't even born when you retired. In just
five weeks, the song went from earning seventeen thousand official
streams a week in the US to four million a week,
an increase of more than twenty thousand percent. It hit
number sixty seven on Spotify's Global Top one hundred, number
two on the Global Daily Viral Songs chart, and topped

(04:04):
the viral charts in sixty five countries. Francis was thrilled
but bewildered. She enlisted her publicist son to help create
a TikTok account, thanking supporters and expressing how thrilling it
was that even kindergarteners had become familiar with her music.
When asked why she thought people were drawn to it,
she said, I think it's innocent and pure, and this

(04:26):
is a time when everything is in such chaos. She
wasn't wrong. There's something almost desperately wholesome about the TikTok
generation latching onto this artifact of pre Kennedy assassination America,
this relic from before Vietnam, before watergates, before everything went sideways.
It's like they're mining the past for innocence. They never

(04:49):
experience finding comfort in a voice that predates their grandparents' trauma.
But here's where the story turns from miraculous to heartbreaking.
Francis had posted earlier that month that she'd been hospitalized
with extreme pain. She died on July sixteenth, twenty twenty five,
due to declining health. In the midst of the song's resurgence.

(05:10):
She got to see the beginning of her revival, got
to record a few grateful tiktoks, got to know that
eighty billion people had heard her voice, but she never
got to see where it might have led. The timing
feels almost scripted by a cruel dramatist. After a life
marked by trauma, the nineteen seventy four rape at knife
point after a concert, her brother George's murder in nineteen

(05:34):
eighty one, being committed to a psychiatric hospital by her father,
she finally gets this unexpected gift of relevance, of joy,
of connection with a new generation, and then gone. You
may even rushed to release the song digitally for the
first time in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish versions,

(05:54):
bringing these nineteen sixty two rarities to streaming the music
industry scrambling to capitalize on a sixty three year old
B side while its singer lay dying in a Florida hospital.
What does it mean that TikTok's fifth biggest song of
summer twenty twenty five was recorded when John F. Kennedy
was president, That teenagers are lip syncing to a woman

(06:16):
who performed for Queen Elizabeth in nineteen sixty three. That
an algorithm can reach back six decades and pluck out
a forgotten B side and make it more popular than
it ever was in its own time. It means that
time doesn't work the way it used to. The past
isn't past anymore. It's all present, all available, all waiting

(06:37):
to be discovered or rediscovered. Every song ever recorded is
potentially next week's viral sensation. Every forgotten artist is one
algorithm tweak away from resurrection. But it also means something sadder.
Connie Francis got her flowers, but she got them as
she was leaving the garden. She got to hear billions
of young voices singing along to a song she'd forgotten.

(07:00):
Got to experience one more hit in a life that
had too many misses. But she didn't get to tour
on it, didn't get to do the talk show Victory Lap,
didn't get to fully inhabit this strange new fame. There's
even a Broadway connection. The new musical Just in Time,
starring Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darren, features Francis as a

(07:22):
character portrayed by Tony nominated Gracie Lawrence. She was supposed
to travel to New York to see it. She never
made it. More in a moment, the last time Pretty

(07:44):
Little Baby charted anywhere was never. It was a B
side in nineteen sixty two, invisible even in its own time.
Its first time on any chart was twenty twenty five,
when its singer was eighty seven and dying. That's not
a comeback story. That's a ghost story, A beautiful, sad,
perfectly twenty twenty five ghost story about how we commune

(08:04):
with the dead through their voices, finding comfort in their innocence,
their simplicity, their distance from our current chaos. You can
ask the flowers, Frances saying, in nineteen sixty one, young
and traumatized but not yet broken, I sit for hours
telling all the bluebirds the Bill and Coop Bird's Pretty
Little Baby, I'm so in love with you. Sixty three

(08:28):
years later, billions of pretty little babies hurt her. They
asked the flowers. The flowers remembered her name just in
time to say goodbye. Sometimes the most powerful resurrections happen
at the very end. Sometimes you have to wait your
whole life for your B side to become your A side.
Sometimes the algorithm is accidentally merciful, giving old stars one

(08:50):
more moment in the light before it goes dark forever.
Taani Francis waited sixty three years for Pretty Little Baby
to matter. It finally did for about twelve weeks in
twenty twenty five. That counts as a happy ending.