from the 7” single, Gordy Records, 1963Ok, so I’ve been sitting here for about twenty minutes now, listening to soul tracks and trying to figure out how to translate what I’m feeling into words, and it’s not easy--- music that was made before one’s birth grants the listener a certain discretion and lenience as compared to the tunes you’ve lived through yourself. That creative license to compose fictional daydreams about older times seems to expand the farther you go back from your birth date, and it’s certainly no secret that most all popular music of the last 50 or 60 years (barring the truly far-out experimental stuff) has essentially just been the tinkering of people who were obsessed with musical history; “what’s past is prologue”, as Shakespeare would say. Martha Reeves and her pals the Vandellas layed down some of the greatest soul cuts to come out of Motown, with an urgency and vigor that set them apart from the Supremes; this story of love lost was their first successful single, beginning a string of hits that carried them well into the next decade.
