On this day in 1970, Neil Diamond received a gold record for his song, ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’. It turns out he was going to need a few more mounts for those records.

After Diamond had signed a deal with the MCA Records label of Universal Pictures’ parent company, MCA Inc., whose label was then called the Uni Records label in the late 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles, California in 1970. His sound mellowed, with such songs as “Sweet Caroline,” “Holly Holy,” “‘Cracklin’ Rosie,” and the country-and-western tinged “Song Sung Blue,” the last two of which reached #1 on the Hot 100. “Sweet Caroline” was Diamond’s first major hit after his slump. Diamond recently admitted in 2007 that he had written “Sweet Caroline” for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life Magazine in an equestrian riding outfit. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 “I Am…I Said” was a top five hit in both the U.S. and UK, and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking upwards of four months to complete.

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