“Shine, Shine, Shine”
Eddy Raven
Written by Ken Bell and Bud McGuire
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
September 25, 1987
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
October 24, 1987
It’s been a minute since we’ve seen Eddy Raven in this feature, but he ends the decade with several No. 1 hits, starting with “Shine, Shine, Shine.”
This was the final single from his Right Hand Man album, which had already produced multiple top ten singles. Indeed, every single that Raven released since “I Got Mexico” topped the charts in 1984 went top ten.
He finally returned to the penthouse with this joyous effort that speaks volumes about the silence of confidence and the loudness of insecurity. Raven doesn’t care how many guys his beautiful partner dances with tonight. He’s happy to sit on the sidelines and watch her “shine, shine, shine,” knowing full well that at the end of the night, she’s going home with him.
Some of the production choices haven’t aged well, especially the steel drum track that sounds like a Fisher Price keyboard, but everything else, from the lyric to his vocal performance, shine shine shines.
Welcome back to the top, Mr. Raven.
“Shine, Shine, Shine” gets a B+.
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Eddy Raven hasn’t been part of the country music conversation since he disappeared from the charts, which diminishes how much of a roll he was on during his hitmaking stretch from the mid-to-late 80s. My southern Minnesota radio station gave him recurrent airplay well into the 2000s, which is the only reason I remember this or several of his other largely forgotten hits.
It’d still been about 20 years since I last heard “Shine, Shine, Shine”, and it sounded better than I remembered, evoking some of the same tropical flavor that worked so well on his previous #1. The positive energy is infectious and I thought Eddy landed some vocal inflections in the bridges that really gave the track some character. I’m not as adept in picking up on production shortcomings so the “steel drum that sounded like it came from Fisher Price” was lost on me. On the other hand, I presume this was one of the latest country hits with a saxophone solo as I recall that saxophones tended to go the way of the woolly mammoth in country music very quickly after the Urban Cowboy era ended. I always thought it sounded good in country so I give Eddy kudos for including it here.
Grade: B
Eddy Raven has been quite active in live performances recently. Although I don’t quite understand why, he has become a big favorite of bluegrass audiences and has performed at numerous festivals, either as a featured performer or in conjunction with acts such as Lorraine Jordan and her band Carolina Road (he has recorded some tracks with them and they are excellent). I have always lived Raven but the strength of his career has been that he is an excellent live performer who can blend in anywhere and knows how to lead and how to take a subordinate role. I wish he had more big radio hits, but he is still out there plugging away and entertaining audiences.
Raven was country music’s consummate utility player in the ’80s: talented, versatile, and consistent.
This song is a perfect example and testament to that.
I will always remember my dad being surprised when I, as a ten year-old, was able to sing along with all the lyrics to Raven’s first country #1 hit “I’ve Got Mexico”, from 1984, while driving down the road in the suburbs of the Twin Cities.
Raven consistently placed songs in the top ten in the late eighties only to have the lights go off for him when the decade turned into the nineties.
He and T. Graham Brown must have been left wondering, “What just happened to our careers?”.
Hearing Eddy Raven again feels like picking up a conversation again with an old friend.