Connie Francis says that the success of "Pretty Little Baby" "Gives Me a New Lease on Life."

If not for TikTok, Connie Francis‘ 1962 tinkly organ bop “Pretty Little Baby” may have been forever obscure. It was never a hit, and Francis, reached by phone at her Parkland, Fla., home, barely remembers recording it. “I had to listen to it to identify it,” admits the 87-year-old pop legend, who became the first woman to top the Billboard Hot 100 as a solo act in July 1960 with “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” one of her three Hot 100 No. 1s.

“Then, of course, I recognized the fact that I had done it in seven languages.”

A friend recently informed Francis that “Pretty Little Baby” had turned up on TikTok as a “viral hit,” an upbeat soundtrack for people (including Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian) showing off babies, puppies, kittens and — befitting the lyric “you can ask the flowers” — flowers. Francis responded: “What’s that?” In a sense, TikTok is just a technological update of American Bandstand in the ’60s, when Dick Clark’s TV countdown regularly drew 8 million viewers and automatically turned songs into hits. “Without Dick Clark, there would have been no Connie Francis,” Francis says.

“Pretty Little Baby” was one of 40 songs Francis recorded during several recording sessions over four days in August 1961, according to her 2017 autobiography Among My Souvenirs: The Real Story Vol. 1. The track landed on her Connie Francis Sings Second Hand Love & Other Hits album.

On April 10, “Pretty Little Baby” was streaming 17,000 times per week in the U.S.; a month later, it was streaming 2.4 million times, an increase of more than 7,000%. The track has 10 billion TikTok views, hitting No. 1 on the app’s Viral 50 and Top 50 charts, and recently crossed over to streaming success, with 14 million global streams, landing at No. 67 on Spotify’s Global Top 100. Francis’ label, Universal Music, recently reissued the versions Francis had sung in Swedish, Japanese and other languages in 1962, when her label, MGM, hoped to score hits in regions outside the U.S.

Francis, who told Facebook followers in March she is awaiting stem cell therapy to treat a “troublesome painful hip,” discussed “Pretty Little Baby,” “Who’s Sorry Now,” Just In Time (the hit Broadway musical about her late onetime boyfriend Bobby Darin) and the domineering nature of her late Svengali father, George Franconero Sr. Of her newfound virality, she tells Billboard: “I’m getting calls from everywhere: ‘You’re a TikTok phenomenon.’”