#3: You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester
City: Quebec City (Levis), PQ
Radio Station: CFLS
Peak Month: April 1979
Peak Position in Quebec City ~ #4
Peak position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #36
Peak Position on Israeli Singles chart ~ #1
Peak Position on Swiss Singles chart ~ #6
Peak Position on Italian Singles chart ~ #7
Peak Position on UK Singles chart ~ #8
Peak Position on Irish Singles chart ~ #11
YouTube: “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”
Lyrics: “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”
Sylvester James Jr. was born in 1947 in Los Angeles. His father had numerous affairs and left Sylvester’s mother and children when he was a young child. He began singing at the age of three, and sang the Al Jolson 1922 hit, “My Buddy”, at a neighborhood child’s funeral a few years later. Biographer, Joshua Gamson in his book The fabulous Sylvester: the legend, the music, the seventies in San Francisco, describes a view of Sylvester as a boy. The women at his church described him as “feminine” and as “pretty as he could be, just like his mother. He wasn’t rough like the other boys. He was prim and proper. We were always hugging on him and kissing on him, because he was so cute.” Family members also described him as “his own kind of boy — ‘born funny'” — preferring the company of girls and women like his grandmother to that of other boys. “He stayed inside a lot, reading encyclopedias, listening to music, and playing his grandmother’s piano.” When Sylvester would turn down the boys’ invitations to play with them, they would say things like, “He act like a girl!” or “He’s going to be a girl.” But his mother would defend him, including his joy at dressing up in her and his grandmother’s clothes, saying that he was not a girl, just a different kind of boy, and a valued part of their family.