Few records are as immediately evocative of time and place as Bobby Hebb’s Sunny. Hearing it we are immediately transported back to an August Bank Holiday scout camp, a transistor radio tuned to Radio London and a secret No 6 smoked behind the latrines!

Deceptively dreamy like only a song which goes through four almost invisible key changes in two and a half minutes can be, Hebb’s object lesson in optimism was actually born out of tragedy. He wrote it to commemorate the death of his brother who was killed in a knife fight in Nashville the day after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.

But it took another couple of years before Hebb – who had been a song and dance man ever since he was three as well as a backup singer for the likes of Bo Diddley and country music legend Roy Acuff – finally got to record it in New York’s Bell Studios. Thanks to a wonderfully understated production – courtesy of Jerry Ross of Spanky And Our Gang, Jay and The Techniques and Keith’s Hey 98.6 fame – Sunny went to number two in the US and number 12 here on the Philips label in 1966.

Not only did it earn Hebb a support slot on what was to prove the Beatles final tour of America but it also went on to be covered by just about everybody from Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald to Dusty Springfield, The Four Tops and The Four Seasons. Even cheesy disco queens Boney M had a stab at it in 1976! So you won’t be surprised to learn that US collection society BMI rated Sunny as the 25th highest earning title of the 20th Century.

Although he probably never had to work again, Hebb soldiered on, writing, recording and performing until 2008 before lung cancer took him two years later. Needless to say he never had another hit. But few serial chartmakers can boast of one as ethereal as Sunny, and we should thank McDonald’s for reviving it as part of its Frappes Convertible campaign.

Stevie Wonder was another world class artist who consigned a version of Sunny to vinyl - and RC readers can hardly have missed his classic For Once In My Life which has featured in a cgi-heavy Sky Sports spot starring not one but six separate David Beckhams. There’s not much we can tell you about Wonder that you probably don’t already know. But we can take this opportunity to introduce you to Jean DuShon, the girl who sang the very original version of the song which went on to become a world beater.

DuShon hailed from Detroit where, as a teenager singing in clubs and bars she gained a reputation for imitating blues and jazz diva Dinah Washington. Later she signed to Chess and, working with two minor Motown housewriters Ron Miller and Orlando Murden, played an uncredited role in putting For Once In My Life together. But at least her name was on the Cadet single which was taken up to radio in April 1966. Sadly it failed to gain sufficient traction with Detroit’s DJs and so label bosses Leonard and Phil Chess pulled the plug and the single died a death.

You know the rest, of course. Wonder hears the song, jazzes it up a bit like only Stevie can and in 1968 takes it into the top three on both sides of the Atlantic. And DuShon? Embittered she may have been that her version of THAT song didn’t even appear on any of her three Chess albums - but she certainly didn’t give up. After stints on the chittlin’ circuit alongside Lloyd Price and Fats Domino, DuShon finally found herself on Broadway as star of award-winning 1970s musicals like Bubbling Brown Sugar (with Cab Calloway) , Blues In The Night and Little Dreamer – A Night In The Life of Bessie Smith, a role which she inherited from the legendary Odetta.

Casting around for a good link we wonder what Steve Miller might feel was the most important night in his life. It could have been during his primary schooldays in the late 1940s when he took lessons from virtuoso guitarist Les Paul, who, with his wife singer Mary Ford, was a regular visitor to the Millers’ Milwaukee home. Or it might be when he got to jam with Muddy Waters in Chicago as a student trying to live his dream as a bluesman.

But we reckon that the time he pulled into San Francisco early in 1966 and, so legend has it, spent his last $5 on a ticket to see the Butterfield Blues Band and the Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore would have to be right up there. His mind reputedly blown by Grace Slick and co, Miller rapidly put a group together and became one of the leading exponents of Haight Ashbury acid rock guitar, as highly rated among hippies as those other SF psychedelic axemen Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen and John Cipollina.

The Steve Miller Band subsequently released six partly inspirational and partly patchy stoner rock albums on Capitol – all of which garnered rave reviews, bubbled around at the bottom of the charts and sustained their leader’s cult status – before finally hitting gold with The Joker in 1973. A change of label to Mercury then led to a successful string of characteristically dreamy soft rock singles like Fly Like An Eagle and Take The Money And Run culminating in Abracadabra, the 1982 Number Two which provides the soundtrack to a current Littlewoods kids clothing ad starring former Popstar Myleene Klass.

Interestingly this is not the first time Steve Miller has been linked with a British TV commercial. In 1990 Levi’s licensed The Joker for one of its iconic 501 jeans ads and the song went straight to Number One as a result! Wouldn’t it be quite magical if Abracadabra did the same?