When we think of the defining artists of the 1990s, our minds tend to alight on the bands of the grunge era: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, or perhaps the Britpop groups: Oasis, Blur et al. But there’s one whose name never seems to come up in those TV retrospectives of the decade – Hootie & the Blowfish.
The South Carolina four-piece could never have been cool. Not with that ridiculous name. But it’s hard to remember now just how big they were. Their 1994 debut album Cracked Rear View sold a staggering 22 million copies, making it the seventh-biggest seller of the decade: more than Nevermind, Vs, and both of the albums Michael Jackson released during the 90s. Even today, it’s the nineteenth biggest-selling album of all time in the US. If you exclude compilations, it’s tenth.
Hootie were formed by two friends in the mid-1980s. Guitarists Darius Rucker and Mark Bryan were both students at the University of South Carolina. They eventually linked up with bassist Dean Felber and drummer Brantley Smith (there never was in actuality a ‘Hootie’).
Initially, they were just a covers band with no more ambition but to provide a good time to paying punters. But after graduating, they made the decision to start writing their own material and replaced Smith with Jim Sonefeld.
Sonefeld came to the audition with an ace up his sleeve: Hold My Hand. In an interview with Songfacts in 2022, he remembered how he wrote it at a time when he was still struggling with the guitar. “While you're writing and writing as a novice, there is a limitation with your hands. But also at the same time, there's a purity that can sneak through when you are limited.”
“If you have something profound that you wanna say - and all of our hearts say and feel profound things - but you're limited in the musical side, you get a really pretty but naive picture. You know, I wanna say something amazing, but gosh, I only have a few chords I know.
"There's a great moment to catch there where there's a combination of being unsure and sort of devout in your thought as well - like I gotta get this thing out.”
Sonefeld explained that when he had tried to write songs previously, nothing had really flowed. “But when I started writing Hold My Hand, it quickly was feeling like a new thing.
"Like, wait, this is flowing. It sort of propelled itself. I didn't stop and go, ‘Dang, I'm stuck. I don't know what to do here.’ It propelled itself as I was sitting there. And those are the special moments that songwriters go after where you're trying to say something, you're trying to have a certain melody and they're flowing at the same time and coming together. So that's what Hold My Hand was for me.”
The lyric he came up with could be about a relationship, but could also be seen as touching on wider issues, especially with its reference in the chorus to “the promised land”. There are nods too, to classic soul music: “with a little love and some tenderness” and - inevitably with any song called Hold My Hand - The Beatles. Coming from a more experienced songwriter that could have been dismissed as cunning, but there’s an endearing gaucheness to Hold My Hand that it’s difficult not to warm to.
Sonefeld’s bandmates certainly did. In an interview with Billboard in 2024, frontman Darius Rucker pinpointed it as the turning point: “He (Sonefeld) played that the day he auditioned for us. He walked out of the room and I told the other guys, ‘He’s in the band!’”
“We had written a couple of songs, but when Soni came in, we really started writing.”
The band began to accumulate material. From 1991, they started issuing their own cassettes to sell at gigs. A couple of years later, they pooled $8,000 of their own money and put out an EP, Kootchypop, on their own Fishco label.
The Kootchypop version of Hold My Hand is a little bit sparse – the harmonies aren’t quite as bulked out - and it’s over five minutes, but essentially it’s the same version that became a hit.
After getting rejected by record company after record company, Kootchypop landed on the desk of Atlantic A&R Tim Sommer. An ex-member of experimental art rock band Hugo Largo (best known for their unusual two-bassist and violin line-up), Sommer heard Kootchypop, was intrigued and decided to go and see them live. In a 2016 feature he wrote for the Observer, he remembered seeing what he described as an “interesting omen.”
“The week I was set to fly down to South Carolina to see Hootie & the Blowfish, I took a look at the Billboard Charts. In the US Top 10 Albums, there was a pile of grunge records, AND Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits.”
“This indicated to me that there was a MAJOR part of the marketplace NOT being served by the record companies, who were signing grunge and only grunge. They really were. I said to myself, Jesus, if Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits is f***ing sitting in the Top 10, man, somebody needs to sign something that could appeal to that audience: all those people going out to buy Bob Seger records.”
Sommer loved them, signed them, and by early 1994 Hootie were in the studio making their debut album at NRG Studios in Hollywood. Don Gehman had been selected as producer, largely because of his track record with John Mellencamp and REM (early Hootie sets would regularly feature REM covers). Recording was conducted swiftly, in just three weeks.
“It was a breeze,” remembers Sommer. “The band had been playing many of those songs for six, seven, eight years, so it was just a matter of shortening them, tweaking them and recording them right. Gehman did a fantastic job.”
![Hootie & The Blowfish - Hold My Hand (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/xoW3bqnr7tw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Hold My Hand was trimmed to a more concise four minutes fifteen, but the harmonies needed something... a bit extra. An associate of the band suggested contacting a bona fide rock legend and expert harmoniser: David Crosby.
“We were trying to figure out who would do it, and our friend Gena Rankin threw out David's name,” Darius Rucker told Grammy.com in 2024. “She said it so casually, we all thought she was messing with us. There was no way a legend like him was going to come be part of this project! Sure enough, two days later, he walked into the studio (to record it). I still can't believe that happened.”
In another interview with Rolling Stone, Rucker revealed that Crosby had little confidence his contribution would be heard by many people: “It was funny because after he had sung, he said to our producer, ‘Next time, could you have me sing with a band that is going to matter? That’s going to be important?’”
Other than Sommer, nobody at Atlantic had much confidence in Cracked Rear View. “Shortly after we finished the record, I played it for the head of A&R, who was based in New York City,” Sommer remembered. “I played this fellow the entire album, and he immediately and firmly pronounced the record ‘unreleasable’ and said it didn’t have any singles.”
“Naturally, I was disappointed, but I trusted my ears. So I went to Danny Goldberg, who ran the West Coast office. I told Danny that the head of A&R said the record was unreleasable. I explained that I respectfully but adamantly disagreed, and I made my case. Danny shrugged, looked at me, and said, ‘Timmy, if it’s so important to you, I’ll make sure it gets put out.’”
Goldberg was as good as his word and Cracked Rear View came out in July 1994, with Hold My Hand selected as the lead single. It took a while to weave its magic - it wouldn’t be until the following February that it peaked at Number 10 on the Billboard chart.
Listeners came round to it gradually. For most of 1994, US rock fans were still processing and coming to terms with the death of Kurt Cobain. But as time passed, listeners became more receptive to something lighter, and more hopeful.
Hold My Hand was the right song at the right time. Its simple sentiments of support and succour in times of trouble (“we’ll rise above this mess”) were exactly what people needed to hear. It probably helped that the music was grunge-adjacent and Rucker’s baritone similar in timbre to Eddie Vedder’s, but Hootie came across as far more relatable and wholesome than any of the grunge bands. They seemed like nice, regular guys. Free of drugs, free of angst.
Further singles were released and Cracked Rear View started flying off the shelves. By the end of 1995, it had become the biggest-selling album in America that year, surpassing even Michael Jackson’s HIStory.
Mocked by the critics and hopelessly unhip, Hootie & The Blowfish would go on to become something of a people’s band in North America. Whilst they were never really able to sustain that huge level of success, they’re fondly regarded by those who were there at the time. And Hold My Hand remains one of those songs that people reach for when the occasion requires – post 9/11 it picked up a lot of airplay.
It’s hard not to see its relevance in today’s divided America. “It comes across as a song about peaceful love and hippie shit, but Hold My Hand was a protest song,” Rucker told Rolling Stone in 2024.
“That’s a song about 'Why are we hating each other?' The country was so divided. The idea was, we can get together. We’re better than this.”
