Name That Tune traveled back to 1980 this morning with one of my most favorite songs and artists!
“Ah! Leah!” is from Donnie Iris’s 1980 album “Back on the Streets” and peaked at #29 on the Billboard Hot 100. Iris wrote the song with Wild Cherry keyboardist Mark Avsec and the tunes theme didn’t start out as an ode to a pretty girl; in fact, it originally started out as an anti-war song with “Ah Leah” as a sort of Gregorian chant. As they continued to put the song together, Donnie mentioned that “Leah” was a “girls name” and they sort of ran in a different direction from there. The title of the song has been referenced in the form of puns on a few of Iris’s later albums—the 2009 live album Ah! Live! and the 2010 Christmas album Ah! Leluiah!.