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"You Shook Me All Night Long" is a song by Australian hard rock band AC/DC, from the album Back in Black. The song also reappeared on their later soundtrack album Who Made Who. It is AC/DC's first single with Brian Johnson as the lead singer, replacing Bon Scott who died of alcohol poisoning in February 1980. It reached number 35 on the US Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart in 1980. The single was re-released internationally in 1986, following the release of the album Who Made Who. The re-released single in 1986 contains the B-side(s): B1. "She's Got Balls" (Live, Bondi Lifesaver '77); B2. "You Shook Me All Night Long" (Live '83 – 12-inch maxi-single only). It is considered AC/DC's signature song.

In January 2018, as part of Triple M's "Ozzest 100", the "most Australian" songs of all time, "You Shook Me All Night Long" was ranked number 63.

Critical reception

Record World said it has "a truckload of gravel and enough raunch to satisfy a stadium-size crowd," as well as "havoc wrecking guitar blasts."

"You Shook Me All Night Long" placed at number 10 on VH1's list of "The 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s". It was also number 1 on VH1's "Top Ten AC/DC Songs". Guitar World placed "You Shook Me All Night Long" at number 80 on their "100 Greatest Guitar Solos" list. In 2021, it was ranked at No. 287 on Rolling Stone's "Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

Rock critic Robert Christgau regarded it as a "drum-hooked fucksong" and the band's "only great work of art".

Live versions

The song has also become a staple of AC/DC concerts, and is rarely excluded from the setlist.

Four live versions of the song were officially released. The first one appeared on the 1986 maxi-single "You Shook Me All Night Long"; the second one was included on the band's album Live; the third version is on the soundtrack to the Howard Stern movie Private Parts, and also appears on the AC/DC box set Backtracks; and the fourth one is on the band's live album, Live at River Plate.

"You Shook Me All Night Long" was also the second song to be played by AC/DC on Saturday Night Live in 2000, following their performance of "Stiff Upper Lip." When AC/DC was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003 by Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, they performed this song with Tyler.

Johnson performed the song with Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden in New York in March 2014. The Salon publication stated on the following morning in its introduction to the video footage of the performance: "This will either be your favorite video today, or a total musical nightmare!"

At one of his two shows at St James' Park in June 2023, Sam Fender brought Johnson on stage to perform "Back in Black" and "You Shook Me All Night Long" with him.

Composition

The song is in the key of G major. The main verse and riff follows a G–C–D chord progression.

Controversy

There have been several claims made since it was released that (at least) some parts of the lyrics to the song were written by Bon Scott.

Silver Smith, late former girlfriend of Bon Scott, interviewed by Jesse Fink for his biography of Scott, Bon: The Last Highway, said: "I know for sure that [the song] was written at [my flat in] Gloucester Road [in Kensington, London] back in '76. 'She told me to come but I was already there' – he wrote that in a letter to somebody, one of his grotty mates, just after we got together, actually. He always kept notebooks and added and subtracted to them and so on. He put in 'American thighs' even way back then, because that was the market they were going to try and crack. So that was written a long time ago." In the same book, Scott's girlfriend in Miami, Florida, a woman under the pseudonym "Holly X", says the original lyric "chartreuse eyes" was changed to "sightless eyes" and that she had a horse called Doubletime. The lyrics "working double time on the seduction line" appear in the finished song.

Doug Thaler, Bon's friend and AC/DC's booking agent on their American tours, also says: "I don't care who tells me anything different: you can bet your life that Bon Scott wrote the lyrics to 'You Shook Me All Night Long'. It's Bon Scott's lyrics all over the place."

From AC/DC: Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be by Mick Wall: "However Malcolm Dome claims that shortly before he died, Bon 'shoved me his book of lyrics. He had sheets of lyrics that he kept in a file, carried them around. He'd been showing me some of the ideas he'd been working for Back in Black. Not the song 'Back in Black' but songs that were for the next album. There were a couple of lines, like, 'She told me to come but I was already there', which ended up in 'You Shook Me All Night Long' – that's a Bon lyric. And I saw it. I saw it written down. There were lyrics, lines used, on Back in Black that Bon wrote. [But] he wasn't credited and to this day no one's really sure what happened. I don't think he even got close to finishing the whole songs. But there are lines in there that I know."