This Top 10 Hit From 1972 Fooled Listeners Into Thinking Neil Young Recorded It

In 1972, "A Horse With No Name" rambled into the Top 10 of the Billboard pop chart, and it would become the biggest hit ever for the band America — and not, as many people thought both then and now, Neil Young. With a sweeping, plaintive, folk-meets-country rock sound, America found their voice on later hits like "Sister Golden Hair" and "You Can Do Magic." But when the band, so named in part because the members were from U.S. military families stationed in England, presented its first big single to the world, they chose "A Horse with No Name." 

The song really does sound exactly like something Young would've released in the early 1970s. And while Young once wrote three classic songs in one day while suffering from a raging fever, "A Horse with No Name" was not one of them. Here's how a Top 10 single probably sold a lot of copies due to a case of mistaken musical identity.

America's self-titled debut LP hit stores in December 1971, and for a while, "I Need You" was planned to be the lead-off single. But a song with more oomph was called for, and so the band turned to a just-recorded song by member Dewey Bunnell. Originally titled "The Desert Song," "A Horse With No Name" was a stark, acoustic song about a restless man wandering the desert. 

Neil Young is one of several rock stars who flopped after a reinvention, in his case choosing synthesizers and vocoders over his distinctively warbled folk rock as the '80s dawned. His original '70s sound was so beloved that when America distributed "A Horse with No Name," many wrongfully credited Young, including his family members. "My dad thought 'A Horse with No Name' was mine!" Young claimed in his memoir "Waging Heavy Peace." Young was even dethroned from the No. 1 slot by America's tune, with "Heart of Gold" being toppled by "A Horse with No Name" in March 1972 after just one week.

Bunnell admitted everything. "I never shied away from the fact that I was inspired by Neil," he told Classic Rock, later explaining to the Wall Street Journal, "I was immersed in his first and second albums while writing 'Horse.'" Full of '70s song lyrics that left everyone scratching their heads, such as describing a desert as full of "plants and birds and rocks and things," "A Horse with No Name" spent three weeks at No. 1. That's two weeks longer than Young did with "Heart of Gold."