72: Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”

By Wm. on September 7, 2026

In my mind’s eye, the snippet of memory occurs on a beautiful day.

The four of us are driving somewhere in my father’s 1971 black LTD. As per usual, I’m sitting behind Dad, while Amy is to my right, Mom in front of her. The sun is shining brightly, the sky a brilliant blue, which makes we wonder now if it’s one of those days that announces an upcoming change of season, when the first cold fronts portending autumn have begun pushing through. The snippet suggests that the road we’re on is at least occasionally shaded by trees.

Naturally, the car radio is on, tuned to a Top 40 station. On comes a song that immediately captures an eight-year-old’s ear. Who knows if this is a first encounter, or how many more times he’ll hear it before the tune settles into recurrent mode on the station. What’s certain is that at some point over those weeks he, and maybe his sister, will belt out the chorus whenever it comes over the airwaves: “Hi, hi, hi, beautiful Sunday!…” Do I know that the artist credited is a Brit who has taken the name of a Kentucky pioneer legend?

—

For a long time I had no insight into when this moment might have occurred. Now that I have access to Billboard pop charts, it would appear to have been mid-to-late summer of 1972, some number of weeks following our June move from Stanford to Walton. (I would have guessed it to have been a spring scene prior to the move, to be honest.) “Beautiful Sunday,” an ode to meeting for picnics in the park and going for long weekend drives, has to be among the first songs with which I fell in love. It’s #16 on the 9/9/72 AT40, one spot shy of its peak. The 20 weeks it would spend on the Hot 100 is more than any other song on this show, longer than even “Alone Again (Naturally)” and “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.”

During the intro to “Beautiful Sunday” on the 9/9 show, Casey relays that ‘Daniel Boone’ is really Peter Lee Stirling, but that turns out to be not wholly correct: Stirling’s birth name was actually Peter Green. (Evidence indicates the name change occurred well before another Peter Green–né Greenbaum–came on the scene with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Fleetwood Mac.) “Beautiful Sunday” was a chart-topper in a few countries, and apparently is still the all-time biggest-selling single in Japan by a Western act. Boone/Stirling/Green passed away in January of 2023.

—

1972 was my second summer of collecting baseball cards. Topps had a fun design that year: team name emblazoned across the top in a 3-D font, twelve different color schemes each shared by one AL and one NL team. If I’m recalling correctly, it was the last set not to be released all at once. The sixth and final ‘series’ of 132 cards would have come out well into the summer, and I can remember thinking in the moment that those later cards felt different to me, maybe crisper and/or clearer. I fished them out from our basement storage earlier today to figure out just why I thought that. It’s mainly lighter tones in the ink used in the border, particularly orange but also green, which I think makes the cards pop a bit more. (The photos do appear to have greater clarity, as well.) In each pair below, a Series 6 card is on the right, with a card from earlier in the year to its left.

(I have surprisingly few Dodgers cards, but even fewer of my beloved Reds. As it turns out, the 50th anniversary of Alston’s final game as manager occurs later this month.)

Even if the timelines sorta sync up, I’m sure I’m conflating things when I claim the vibe I get from those Series 6 cards comes close to matching the onset of cooler, clear days speculated upon in that fabled car ride above.