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Tamla T 54082 (A), July 1963
b/w Tie A String Around Your Finger
(Written by Berry Gordy)
Since I last wrote about the Marvelettes, their original lead singer Gladys Horton has sadly passed away. Motown Junkies extends its condolences to her family and friends.
Unfortunately, the next Marvelettes record up for review is scarcely their finest work. This bit of daffy nonsense had been one of the more memorable cuts from the group’s fourth album, The Marvelous Marvelettes. The LP, released back in February 1963, had been something of a disappointment both artistically and commercially; a series of often capable but also often unremarkable girl group workouts augmented by two separately recorded singles (the timeless Strange I Know and the less impressive Locking Up My Heart), it suffers in comparison to its immediate predecessor, Playboy, the first great Motown album.
Motown must have struggled to pick a third single from The Marvelous Marvelettes, because while a lot of it is pleasant enough, to my ears there really isn’t one remaining unused track that jumps out and shouts “hit record”. Nonetheless, for whatever reason the label weren’t happy with the newest song cut by the group, Tie A String Around Your Finger, which ended up used as the flipside here. Instead, they plumped for My Daddy Knows Best, the only track from the LP penned and produced by Motown boss Berry Gordy Jr., which may have been a factor in the decision.
This is a retrograde step in almost every sense. A largely straightforward midtempo beat-driven pop stomp with more than a hint of Little Eva’s The Loco-Motion about it, the tune has one or two interesting moments, but it’s mostly predictable, down-the-line stuff, and disappointingly conventional. The interesting moments are almost enough to save the song – the Get out and get a job section which first crops up at 0:52 is both unexpectedly touching and really quite lovely, if too short-lived, and the warlike, echoing drum riff that opens the record briefly raises hopes – but on the whole this sounds like an opportunity missed.
Gladys Horton’s lead vocal is pleasingly throaty, if a little flat in places, but yet again poor scansion in the lyrics forces her to jump through hoops to fit the words to the music; the end result is often awkward. The other Marvelettes are again shrill and grating, in an unwelcome reminder of their similarly raw performances back on their first album, Please Mr Postman, back in 1961.
The lyrics, though, are the most jarring thing about this. The era of teenage rebellion and independence was well and truly in motion, and yet Motown – and its president – saw fit to release a song about the importance of listening to your parents and respecting their choices when it comes to your romantic life.
A surprising misjudgement of the popular mood, the song features Gladys’ narrator telling her would-be boyfriend her father doesn’t approve of his life choices, and that she agrees with him. “While you’re in pool rooms / You should be in school rooms”, she advises him in the song’s most memorable couplet. It’s completely asinine; the central sentiment, “don’t let feckless boys take advantage of you”, is laudable, but it’s not the stuff of which pop records are made, certainly not pop records by one of the best groups in America. Also, even if the message were something the teens of 1963 would readily lap up, its delivery is so crushingly obvious and unbearably preachy that it casts Gladys’ character in an unfavourable light, controlled by her parents and happy to throw allegations at her boyfriend (the role the listener is made to play, meaning Gladys spends the entire record criticising us directly) based solely on her father’s say-so.
There is the tiniest hint of a smirk at the very end, as Gladys is being faded out (Don’t say that he’s mean / I’ll have to tell him everything), which adds the merest touch of irony to the title – but otherwise, the whole thing comes across as didactic and deadly serious, a sermon to the Marvelettes’ teenage listeners as reinforcement of (or replacement for) their own parents’ advice. My daddy told me that boys may say some things that aren’t true, Gladys advises in the first line; we’re only a couple of steps away from “Just Say No” territory, at which point I’ll have to call the music police.
The American public, who less than a year ago had pushed a succession of fabulous Marvelettes singles right up the pop charts, were left completely cold by all of this. The record just about cracked the pop Top 70, but black radio wasn’t interested at all; this was the group’s first single to miss the R&B charts completely. Their time as Motown’s top girl group was now officially over, their crown about to be ceded to Martha and the Vandellas in very public fashion.
The Marvelettes’ weakest single to date, this should really have been left on the album where it belonged.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
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This is certainly a candidate for the worst Marvelettes single
ever. I’m glad you mentioned the scansion: the thudding accent on the first syllable of ‘intend’ (‘promise many sweet things that they never INtend to do) drives me up the wall. I think 4 is generous, but I appreciate, as always, your picking out the scattered saving graces which – perhaps – save the song from utter disaster. But many glorious Marvelette moments lie in the future, and I don’t think they ever sank this low again. (And I love the flip side).
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On June 25, 1975 I bought the Marvelettes vinyl Anthology set, which I think is the very month Motown released it. I believe it was the only new vinyl acknowledgment by Motown that entire decade that the now-dormant group once worked them, and gives credence to those who argue, that after the 1960s, Motown treated the Marvelettes like footnotes.
The Anthology series was a welcome set of reissuing Motown greats in an era of rising disco, but the Marvelettes set felt hurried (or an afterthought) and didn’t even include the color 12-page booklet other stars got. As far as that goes, it was the Temptations set that got the most scholarly and insightful essay of them all. But the Marvelettes set (as did the others) at least gave us, for the first time, the exact release dates of those favorite 45s of the 60s.
Thus it was in 1975 I first heard not only “My Daddy Knows Best” but “He’s A Good Guy Yes He Is” which were both not on their 1966 Greatest Hits, nor any of the eleven volumes of the various artists’ 16 Original Big Hits. Additionally it contained the last three singles to post-date their 1968 Sophisticated Soul album. And here we disagree -finally- on a record’s worth. In my affection, “Daddy” is an 8, or at least a solid 7.
Read Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go, and you’ll learn that every Gordy patriarch from the first days after Emancipation prized a hard-work ethic with an almost Biblical reverence and impressed the same on the generation he was raising. Even before leaving the south, and unlike many blacks who were ruthlessly swindled -or worse- the Gordys were meticulous record keepers, holding onto every receipt, and having a detailed paper trial of when and where they worked, what they owed or what was owed to them.
These same patriarchs also taught their sons that it was an unacceptable waste of resources to try to fence in your female talent. These dictums ultimately and obviously embedded themselves in Berry Jr., and all four of his beautiful sisters -Esther, Loucye, Anna and Gwen- contributed to their brother’s enterprise as writers, sales department personnel, chaperones, or in eldest sister Esther’s case, a vice president.
I find all of this Gordy mantra encapsulated in “My Daddy Knows Best,” disguised entertainingly as a teenager girl declaring that only working men need apply for the position of her boyfriend. As you note, it sold poorly, but it was doubtlessly welcomed by the parents of whatever teenagers brought it home. It’s wish fulfillment fantasy for them, especially the father’s of teenage girls, sleeping with one eye open, praying their daughters won’t be taken in by a lazy, would-be Lothario, and setting such store on father’s advise that it trumps even teenage passion.
Of course, this could have been better done, and in no universe would I count “Daddy” as any equal to “Bill,” “Hunter, “Magician,” “Postman” or “Too Many Fish.” It pales readily to the mature melancholy of “Strange I Know” and the heart-laid-bare “Forever.” Still, it has my affection.
Conservative it may be, but now and then, there’s nothing wrong with sending out a record suggesting to teenage girls they have a right to set their standards high and stick to them. As late as the middle 1980s, even Madonna found an opportunity to ship an equivalent message: Only boys who save their pennies make my rainy days.
đŸ™‚
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I completely agree with your sentiments and score. Having purchased the Marvelettes Anthology so soon after its introduction, I am guessing that you were able to avoid the misadventures that I, and perhaps some others reading this, experienced when I purchased my copy. I believe my purchase was made in September, 1976 or 1977. My memory escapes me after 40 years. As I played Side 2, which backed Side 1, I noticed a scratchy sound on the song “I’ll Keep On Holding On.” I returned the anthology to the department store in New York City where I had purchased it, and brought home another set. Once again, the same flaw appeared in the same location on the record. I concluded this was no scratch but a production flaw. I returned the second album, got my money back, and contemplated further action
that occurred when I visited my parents in December for the holidays in Florida. During my stay. I visited Spec’s Records and Videos, a popular chain in South Florida and asked for the anthology. This place had turntables on hand so that a potential purchaser could sample its products. What a shock I felt when I heard the same flaw over 1,000 miles from home. This was now a national problem! Upon returning home, I went to my typewriter (remember them?) and wrote a letter to Berry Gordy describing all of the above. In less than 2 weeks, on Martin Luther King’s birthday, not yet a national holiday so there was mail service, my doorbell rang, and a package was presented to me. After ripping open the wrapping, there I saw a Marvelettes Anthology, but a different anthology. On this one, Side 4 backed Side 1 and Side 3 backed Side 2, so I figured it had come from a different pressing. Sure enough, each side was flawless. Then I read the invoice: 0 dollars, 0 cents. I immediately said to no one in particular, since I was alone, “Berry Gordy, you’re my new friend.”
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A similar thing happened to me in the mid 70s with the Temptations anthology. I think it was on side 2 on Get Ready, there was a weird phasing issue (or something like that). Took it back to the store and got another one. Same problem. Figured it was the pressing. Very annoying but kept it for the rest of the material.
Unfortunately, I never took the initiative to write a letter to Motown figuring they were far too big to listen to me. So I had no ultimate resolution to the issue. When I wanted to listen to Get Ready, I had to pull out my copy of the purple Temptations Greatest Hits.
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Hmmm… message or no message, it’s the group’s weakest-ever A-side, a true (defining) clunker, that endless words, feint-hearted praise and so on, cannot hope to justify… so should’ve been left on the album – perhaps better, with hindsight, to have kept it unreleased.
NEXT!
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I can’t argue with the sentiment that “Romance without finance can be a nuisance”!
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If your mate hangs out in poolrooms and brings nothing financially into the relationship, romance will only go so far.
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Not a bad song, but needed a better arrangement. Where’s Mickey Stevenson?
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i often wondered what did the man want the boy to do? Go to a “schoolroom” or “Get out and get a job”?
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Little Lisa cut a revival of this. Her version can be downloaded from the UMC digital release “Motown Unreleased 1965”.
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This isn’t among the best of The Marvelettes’ cuts, but, I think it’s better than a “4”. I’d give it a “5” or “5.5”.
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ok this song is quite awful, especially if you compare it to others Marvelettes songs like ‘Forever’ or ‘Strange I Know’. But there is a delightful version of ‘My Daddy Knows Best’ by Little Lisa that’s been published on ‘Motown Unreleased 1965’, and this one is a candidate for the funniest Motown recording (just as all other Little Lisa songs, actually).
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