KC & The Sunshine Band – That’s The Way (I Like It)

He Worked in a Record Store and Watched Customers Forget the Names of Songs — So He Made Sure His Would Never Happen

Harry Wayne Casey had a specific theory about pop hooks, developed from years of watching customers walk into a record store unable to name the song they were looking for. They would hum a melody, describe a feeling, guess at a word — and walk out with the wrong thing or nothing at all. Casey, who worked at a shop associated with TK Records in Hialeah, Florida while teaching himself the music business from the inside out, made a mental note: whatever he wrote would have a title that doubled as the chorus, repeated until it was physically impossible to forget. His model, improbably, was the Beatles — a group he didn’t much like, but whose trick of hammering a title phrase into a listener’s memory on songs like “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” struck him as the most efficient piece of commercial songcraft he had ever encountered. When Casey and his writing and production partner Richard Finch sat down to make “That’s the Way (I Like It)” in 1975, that principle was already built into the foundation.

The song’s other formative influence was more deliberately provocative. The “uh-huh, uh-huh” that defines the chorus was not the original plan. Casey had been listening to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus,” the French recording famous for its explicitly sexual breathing, and the first versions of what became “That’s the Way (I Like It)” used something closer to that — extended, suggestive vocalisations that Casey himself later acknowledged were “a little bit overboard.” He simplified them. The song was also initially called “What You Want” before they settled on the final title. By the time it was cleaned up enough for radio, the innuendo was still very much present — just operating at a pitch that allowed stations to play it without complaint. Some considered it risqué regardless. The sexual double meanings were not accidental, and they were not entirely hidden.

The Summer Sound from a Hialeah Studio

Everything about the recording environment at TK Records in Hialeah was conducive to the sound Casey and Finch were developing. Henry Stone, the label’s founder and owner — a veteran of decades in independent American R&B who had worked with Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, and James Brown — ran TK as a genuinely open operation, allowing Casey and Finch to use the studio after hours and experiment at no cost while they were still finding their footing. The house band that coalesced around the early Sunshine Band sessions — Finch on bass, Jerome Smith on guitar, Robert Johnson on drums, Fermin Goytisolo on percussion — was assembled from the best players on the Miami scene, shaped by the city’s distinctive blend of Bahamian Junkanoo rhythms, Cuban funk, and American soul. When Finch later described the recording of “That’s the Way (I Like It)”, he pointed to a specific quality in the atmosphere: “If you listen to that record closely, you can hear everyone smiling while they’re singing.”

The single was the second of five US number-one hits for KC and the Sunshine Band. “Get Down Tonight” had already established the template that summer — the spare groove, the call-and-response hook, the unapologetic pursuit of a dancefloor rather than a radio playlist — and “That’s the Way (I Like It)” arrived riding the same momentum. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1975, then was displaced by Silver Convention’s “Fly, Robin, Fly,” then returned to number one for a second week — one of only a handful of chart-toppers in Billboard history to reclaim the top position within the same month. It simultaneously hit number one on the R&B singles chart. In the twelve months that followed, KC and the Sunshine Band would score four number-one pop singles — the first act to achieve that in a twelve-month period since the Beatles in 1964. Three of those singles crossed over to number one R&B as well.

The song peaked at number four in the UK, where it was received as a driving, horn-fuelled record that sat at the intersection of funk and what would shortly be codified as disco — a word that Casey and his band were not particularly attached to. His own description of what he was making was always closer to a “funky progression of R&B,” music shaped by a multi-ethnic south Florida sound that had been absorbing Caribbean and Latin influences long before those crossovers became commercially legible to the American mainstream. “That’s the Way (I Like It)” has since appeared in dozens of films, soundtracks, and commercial contexts — its durability a direct result of the craft built into its construction from the beginning. Casey designed it to be unforgettable. It has been.