Ram Jam were an American rock band who belong to the purest category of one-hit wonder: a single, riff-driven anthem and almost nothing else. "Black Betty", released in 1977, was a hard-charging, electrified reworking of an old folk and work song, and its galloping riff and "bam-ba-lam" hook made it a rock-radio and sports-arena staple that has never gone away.
The band were short-lived and never repeated its success, but the song has proved astonishingly durable, licensed endlessly for films, adverts, and stadium playlists thanks to its sheer adrenaline.
On streaming, "Black Betty" sits near 589 million plays, while their next genuinely different track trails at well under a million. That sends the ratio into the hundreds, one of the most extreme figures in our entire database.
By our measure Ram Jam are a certified one-hit wonder of the starkest kind. Their catalogue, on the numbers, is essentially one electrified rock anthem, a reworked old folk song so packed with energy that it has outlived its era entirely while the rest of the band's work disappeared without trace. That galloping riff still does more work than most bands' entire catalogues.