I really enjoyed reading through this thread last week; I'm amazed that I had never encountered it before.

I've watched "In The Heat of the Night" quite a few times on TV, but not recently, and I don't recall the song in question. I'll be keeping my ears open next time!

Quincy Jones is/was a musical genius, and I'm sure he did a great job creating a musical "substitute" for Sam the Sham's classic, complete with tongue-in-cheek inside-joke lyrics.

I was reminded of this whole discussion a couple of nights ago while watching the more recent film "That Thing You Do," which features many newly-written songs designed to evoke the sound of the sixties (or, more accurately, several different "sounds" of that era).

The title song is a wonderful "Beatlesque" creation, as are two or three additional songs supposedly written, and actually performed, by the band composed of the central characters.

Even more amazing and admirable is the collection of numbers performed by the other acts sharing their tour bus: there's a black girl group that looks like the Supremes but actually sounds more like the Shirelles, a solo act more or less in the mold of, say, Leslie Gore (although one of you may suggest a more apt comparison) and a few others, and all of them do songs written for the movie that recreate recognizeable styles. It's like a whole parallel universe of '60s pop music ~ and the composers just did a great job on every one of them.

The whote effort reminded me of this discussion of a single made-for-a-movie song intended to echo a specific real-world hit tune without actually "covering" or duplicating it.