Maurice Williams is an American singer and songwriter who, with his group the Zodiacs, recorded one tiny, perfect piece of doo-wop history. "Stay", released in 1960, is famous for being one of the shortest songs ever to top the US charts, a breathless plea barely a minute and a half long, crowned by a soaring falsetto.
Williams kept performing on the oldies circuit for decades, but nothing he recorded approached the reach of "Stay", which became a permanent standard, covered by acts from The Four Seasons to Jackson Browne and featured in Dirty Dancing.
On streaming, "Stay" sits near 134 million plays, while his next most-streamed track trails at well under half a million. That sends the ratio above 300, one of the most extreme figures in our entire database.
By our measure Maurice Williams is a certified one-hit wonder of the very starkest kind. His catalogue, on the numbers, is essentially one minute-and-a-half of pleading doo-wop perfection, a song so compact and so enduring that it has been covered for generations while everything else he recorded sits almost entirely forgotten behind it.