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VIP 25031 (A), December 1965
b/w Don’t Be Too Long
(Written by Berry Gordy)
There’s an argument to say that Motown were never better than the winter of 1965/66, that this was in many ways the label’s high water mark. For sure it was both the best and worst of times to be newly signed to Motown; the label’s coffers were now swollen to such an extent that Berry Gordy could afford to take as many long shots as he fancied, but the pressure to perform had grown too. If the chances of getting a Motown record deal were high, so were the chances of being dropped straight after. Anyone without a hit under their belt couldn’t expect to stick around for too long.
Indeed, as 1965 draws to a close, we find Motown in a bit of a strange place. In some respects, this was the same little black-owned independent company, run from out of a cramped house in Detroit; new signings, wooed by the label’s sudden vault to the top, were often underwhelmed by the modest premises, so much at odds with Motown’s slick, glossy public image. In other ways, though, Motown had changed beyond recognition, and those new signings were a major part of that. We’ve already said goodbye to a lot of the faces that built Motown, their departures barely registering as talented newcomers came thick and fast.
At this stage, the most striking of the new arrivals were female vocalists. Most of Motown’s attempts to replace Mary Wells in the label’s line-up had met with limited success, commercially if not artistically; the careers of Brenda Holloway and Kim Weston had both seemingly hit brick walls, and despite the company’s perseverance with both, they were still in the market for a new solo female star. And they certainly went looking; although the slow pace of entries here on Motown Junkies has dulled the impact a bit, we’ve only just met Tammi Terrell and Barbara McNair. All of these women have exceptional voices, and with Gladys Knight just around the corner, the larder was now well-stocked with great singers. And still Motown went looking.
And now, here’s Chris Clark, who offered something very different indeed.
WHO’S GONNA TAKE YOUR JIVE
Chris Clark, Motown’s first new white soul act since R. Dean Taylor, was a Californian nightclub singer (from Santa Cruz, not Los Angeles as often stated), who’d been recommended to Berry Gordy by Hal Davis in the label’s West Coast office. But she wasn’t really a “new” signing at all.
Rather, Chris was someone called off the bench after a long apprenticeship; she’d actually been at Motown since 1963. Like Martha Reeves, having turned up at Hitsville for an audition, she ended up doing office work while waiting for her chance behind the mic. (Like Martha, she was also uncommonly tall, only even more so in Chris’ case.) Eventually, that chance came, with a song written and produced by none other than Gordy himself. Acres of print (and more recently, electrons) have been dedicated to gossip, rumours, hearsay and chit-chat over just why the boss took a sudden interest in Chris’ career, and often – to this day, in fact – that’s used as a stick with which to beat her, a talentless white woman who only got a record deal because she was screwing the boss, the heady cocktail of nepotism and race as potent as ever.
(Incidentally, can I just get something off my chest here? “Blue eyed soul” as an identifiable genre of music is a thing, yes, fair enough, but it’s not a catch-all descriptor for any soul music sung by any white artist. Miss Clark here should really be exhibit A for this position. Yes, a lot of white soul artists ultimately tended towards the MOR end of the spectrum – but no more so than black artists covering sappy white standards. There’s more “soul” in this than in 90% of The Temptations In A Mellow Mood, for instance. But I digress.)
This does Chris a massive disservice, because regardless of who she was or wasn’t sleeping with, she had an excellent voice. It wasn’t just the colour of her skin that made her stick out at Motown, nor was it her tomboy demeanour and refusal to play along with the charm school duties the image-obsessed label forced all its female acts to undertake (although, perhaps tellingly, she and Brenda Holloway – another outcast from the Detroit clique – became firm friends). Rather, Chris was just different altogether, gung-ho and game and immediately interesting, and whatever the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, there’s no doubt in my mind that Gordy also felt he had a real talent on his hands. And he was right.
Several people have called Chris Clark Motown’s (or even America’s) answer to Dusty Springfield, and there’s a lot of mileage in the comparison beyond their being two blonde white girls: they were both husky-voiced soul singers who fooled a lot of first-time listeners into thinking they were black Southerners. In Dusty’s case, both Martha Reeves and Mary Wells made the assumption, and Chris caused similar confusion when people found out she was actually Caucasian and from the West Coast. This went down poorly with Motown’s increasingly-alienated black urban fans (Clark was actually booed off the stage at the Apollo by a crowd who hadn’t realised she was white, a neat mirroring of the similar nonsense Bob Kayli had faced from audiences who didn’t realise he was black), but white listeners reacted positively – as they always have – to the white girl with the black voice.
(One British journalist even tagged her with the nickname “The White Negress”, a sobriquet surely meant as a compliment – but which brings modern listeners up short, and which apparently once caused Chris some bother when she repeated this story during an interview with a Deep South radio station. Suffice to say, she’s not called that any more).
But that’s the backstory. What’s the result like?
EVERY DOG IS GONNA HAVE ITS DAY
It’s excellent, obviously. Yet another new talent unearthed, Motown’s scouting department surely the envy of any major league sports franchise when it came to picking winners. I remember the first time I heard this, having been led to expect an embarrassment, a grubby favour for services rendered, a distracting footnote in the Motown story. What we have here, instead, is something quite different from anything Motown have done before, blues and honky-tonk (no pun intended) piano mingled together in a heady cocktail of lolloping pop-soul fun, and CC riding over the top in engaging style, another fine new name to add to the increasingly overcrowded roster.
Now, it’d be all very well for me to say for the record that since I have no interest at all in who went to bed with who, there’s no need to mention it again, as the story adds no extra dimension here, doesn’t inform what’s on the actual record. But I’m actually not so sure that’s true. There’s a great bit in Citizen Kane where the title character puts his new wife, a low-rent club singer, through the humiliation of mounting an opera with her in the lead role just to prove herself (for his own reputation); the opera in question opens, implausibly, with a full aria, the singer left completely exposed, with predictable results. Do Right Baby Do Right, whose backstory would appear to share a number of parallels here, opens in similar fashion. No quiet entrance, no hiding behind a Funk Brothers fanfare; Chris Clark is introduced to the world with an aria of her own, stranded without instruments for fourteen long seconds and with just two words to sustain her, a long, melismatic, acapella “You… bet-ter…”
But here’s where the story diverges, because Chris smashes it out of the park, proving immediately that she belongs, quieting the doubters, setting us up for the pumping, wheezing strut of the next three minutes, as she takes complete control.
It’s interesting to me that after this single bombed – which was maybe to be expected, records on the lower-priority VIP imprint rarely receiving Motown’s full promotional attention – Chris Clark was pushed into all sorts of other interesting directions, but never really followed up the spark she began with here. As with so many mid-Sixties Motown débuts and dead ends, this is a tantalising glimpse of something that never quite happened; arguably, Motown would never get any closer than this to having their own answer to Dusty Springfield.
And yet here, on this one single, she’s magnificent, the band apparently falling into place behind her, frenzied piano and growling sax (and the Lewis Sisters, no less, on backing vocals, and credited on the label too!) all trading blows in a thick and menacing soup of bitter recriminations, and Chris Clark fronting it all with a furious, magnificently pissy sneer of considerable delicacy and dexterity.
She loses her grip slightly on it a couple of times, sure, but then for each weaker moment, like the hey! hey! exhortations near the end, there’s something magnificent, like her melismatic near-solo reprise/relapse in the bridge to the middle eight at the 1:10 mark – You know I ne-hee-hee-heed you / Oh, how I nee-heed you, baby, tailing off for that duck-walking baritone sax to buzz and scrape along the piano lid.
Berry Gordy has been called a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid, and he wouldn’t have promised some random girl a record (and written it, and produced it) for any reason if he didn’t think something good would come of it. Whatever the salacious subtext, it’s just as likely Gordy saw and heard something in Chris Clark which let him write and produce a different kind of record, to roll up his sleeves and flex his creative muscles again. More isolated than ever from the Motown factory floor, the big boss was still capable of doing fascinating and unexpected things when a project sparked his interest; here, he’s got a new kind of voice and a new kind of singer to play with, and together they make this record something new.
Yet again in the course of writing this blog, I find myself confronted with a narrative and a record which seem to bear no relation to each other; I really liked this one. Now’s the time, alright.
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!)
You’re reading Motown Junkies, an attempt to review every Motown A- and B-side ever released. Click on the “previous” and “next” buttons below to go back and forth through the catalogue, or visit the Master Index for a full list of reviews so far.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in Chris Clark? Click for more.)
The Supremes “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine” |
Chris Clark “Don’t Be Too Long” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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Ken said:
So relieved to hear your positive assessment of Chris Clark. I’ve always loved her.
And since we got to hear so little of that voice in the 60’s, it was an amazing treat when Universal finally put out a fantastic all-Clark 2 CD set in 2005. Giving us – at long last – a chance to revel in all those hidden-in-the-vault tracks the world could’ve been grooving to about 40 years earlier.
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coustouge11220 said:
I thought Chris Clark’s ‘Love’s Gone Bad’ and in particular ‘I want to go back there again’ were real Motown gems and could never understand why they weren’t proper Big Hits. ‘Do Right, Baby, Do Right’, I feel, is in the same Motown park as much of Shorty Long’s output or some of Eddie Holland’s recordings – maybe there was a niche vogue’ for this type of music that Motown was trying to get into or maybe it was Mr Gordy’s preferred musical flavour as I think it also bears passing resemblance to ‘Let Me Go The Right Way’, another Gordy production. It’s mixing of soul, jazz and popular music styles is experimental but is a long way from Gordy’s Sound of Young America. It is much more sophisticated and adult than that. So, interesting as it is, and excellent as Chris Clark undoubtedly is, I would put this recording in a ‘Motown Curiosities’ grouping. As for marks out of ten, that’s a hard one because so much of the Motown output was excellent and not all of the excellence sold in the millions of copies – although by 1965 – 1966 Motown was putting out so much that was good and hitting the charts there were wonderful recordings that were simply trampled in the rush. I know your marking system is your own personal rating, but I find it difficult to give this higher marks than ‘Back in My Arms Again’ or ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, for example, or the same mark as ‘The Tracks of My Tears’ or ‘ Come See About Me’. Compared to those recordings, and so many others including other Chris Clark offerings, I could only give ‘Do Right, Baby, Do Right’ a 6 – which is what you gave the Velvelettes’ ‘Needle In A Haystack’.
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The Nixon Administration said:
This one probably benefitted from the long wait between entries – if I’d written it straight away it would have had an 8, but listening to it over and over for a month helped to bump it up. It has very little to do with “the Motown Sound” as we know it, it’s something quite different – the Shorty Long comparison is a great one – but I really like it all the same.
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Landini said:
Wow! What a great record. Finally just heard it. To my ears it is one of those “Is it Motown or is it not Motown?” It isn’t at first listen a “typical Motown record” but the more I listen I hear the Motown start to come out. Pleasantly surprised that the Lewis Sisters sound so good. From what little I have heard from them, I was never impressed with their vocals (great songwriters though!)
Mr. Nixon, you make some great points about blue eyed soul. I am a strange person in that I hear “soul” in the most unlikely places (Beach Boys, the Band, early Elton John, ELO, Charlie Rich) I was shocked when I heard that Elton’s record of “Bennie & the Jets” got him on Soul Train! I feel like “Bennie” was one of the most Soul-less(!) things he ever did. Some of what people were calling blue eyed soul in the 70s really shocked me. I thought KC/Sunshine band were almost a minstrel act! Listening to their music later I do realize that it was well produced & tight but still….
Poor Chris Clark came along at a point when Motown, radio & the general public didn’t know what to do with her. I wonder if, with the right producer, etc, she could have done her own “Dusty in Memphis” album.
Footnote — In the early 70s a Dept Store was cleaning out their record dept & had tons of cut-out albums. I remember seeing hundreds of Chris Clark’s “Soul Sounts” album for $1.99. Bonehead here didn’t buy one! And I did know who she was but hadn’t heard her music. Oh well.
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144man said:
I got my copy of “Soul Sounds” in a Woolworths sale for under a £.
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Daniel Robinson said:
Wow, great deal!
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Randy Brown said:
“Bennie” was the first I’d ever heard of Elton, and I too can’t understand why that song caught on in our ‘hood. Baltimore soul radio station WWIN was famous for mixing in odd white records: Carole King’s “So Far Away” got heavy rotation in early ’72, and they supposedly were instrumental in breaking Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” But “Bennie” is a head-scratcher.
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Landini said:
Wow! Hey buddy, did you grow up in Baltimore? I grew up in the lily white suburbs of Fairfax, VA & was able to pick up some of the DC soul stations & discovered some great music. I now live in Annapolis. I always thought Elton John’s most “soulful” music was on MADMAN ACROSS THE WATER & TUMBLEWEED CONNECTION! Best to ya! PS — Did your soul stations play the Magnificent Men? Those guys were very soulful!
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Randy Brown said:
Also: I remember seeing early pictures of the original Tower Records store in California. Hundreds of copies of mid-60s Motown LPs stacked up for quick sale, including some of the “16 Big Hits” albums. Drool, drool…
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Landini said:
Yeah, it the mid-70s I picked up some 1.99 Motown LPS (SOPHISTICATED SOUL/Marvelettes; TAYLOR MADE SOUL/Bobby Taylor; SOUL MASTER / Edwin Starr) On the non-Motown side I found a Candi Staton FAME label album. My dormmates thought I was nuts!
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Mark V said:
Over the nearly 50 years since this came out (and I bought the 45), this record has only gained in its power to please.
I’m glad I don’t have to rate these tunes on a regular basis. Since I placed “Love’s Gone Bad” in my fifty 10’s, I doubt I could give this a nine. Still, Chris wasn’t often given material this good, and her performances tended to depend a good deal on the quality of the songs and production she received.
Good to have a steady supply of reviews back!
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Randy Brown said:
Two observations: 2648 West Grand is a bungalow, not a rowhouse. And this might have been a better record (and perhaps a hit) without the double-tracked Clark vocal, which frequently gets haphazard.
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The Nixon Administration said:
Well, today I learned “row house” is American for terraced house, rather than the British sense of a house in a row. I’ll amend the review to be less confusing.
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Lord Baltimore said:
Decades ago I would see Chris Clark’s album cover on inner sleeves of other Motown LPs but would not hear any of her output until the present, with the advent of internet. The track is unmistakably Funk Brothers during their coming of age era and smacks of Shorty Long indeed – I dare say with some minor lyric adjustments Shorty could have cut this himself. Although I’m not a fan of this intro, this should’ve been a hit for somebody so why not Chris Clark? I like this song, but in hindsight it doesn’t hold up to the Chart-Toppers Motown cranked out during that time. I give it a “7”
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nafalmat said:
The genius of Berry Gordy comes to the surface once again with this masterpiece. By now his name wasn’t appearing nearly as much on writing and producing credits. Presumably he was more busy running the company, and I suppose he was just working on his pet musical projects, and who can blaming for not wanting to make a pet project out of the gorgeous Chris Clark. A lovely looking lady with an incredibly appealing, seductive and soulful voice for a white girl. I love all her singles even the rather lightweight ‘Whisper you love me boy’ although I would admit that is the least worthwhile of her single sides. This track is simply marvelous and really gets under my skin. I always considered it as shame Chris Clark, the Elgins and the Velvelettes were initially assigned to the VIP label which to me seemed to the dustbin of Motown’s output. Certainly, many of Motown’s worst records were released on VIP during 1964 thru 1971. I’m sure Motown didn’t put so much effort in promoting the VIP releases as they did the main labels. Hence this record stood little chance of becoming a major hit. Eventually Chris got ‘promoted’ to the Motown label but even then they didn’t seem to put that much effort into promoting her. I think she could have been a big singing star as she certainly had a unique voice and good looks.
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Randy Brown said:
Also, she made the singular LP on Weed (“all of your favorite artists are on…”).
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Randy Brown said:
No “All of…”.
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The Nixon Administration said:
CC Rides Again won’t trouble us directly here on Motown Junkies, but we will be telling the story in much more detail later in the Sixties, so stick around 🙂
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Dick B said:
Nice song. Never heard of her before.
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Landini said:
My friend, Mr Nixon, you mentioned TEMPTATIONS IN A MELLOW MOOD. I actually picked up a copy of the CD for $3 a few years ago more out of curiosity. I expected it to be dreadful but was pleasantly surprised. Taken has a whole it can be a bit burdensome but most of the tracks sound better when mixed in with other music on a homemade CD or cassette or random playlist. in the early 90s, the then current Tempts did a similarly styled album called FOR LOVERS ONLY which is quite nice in a kind of quiet storm/lite jazz/smooth urban fashion.
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John Plant said:
Stunning and irresistibly funky. 9 seems one notch too high (and it definitely does NOT top ‘Dancing in the Streets’) – but very likely it will grow on me and make itself indispensable. Yes, I hear the Shorty Long echoes. Lots of fun, and a relief to escape the bikini machine! And yes, hurrah for Dusty of blessed memory. Her ‘I only want to be with you’ was the anthem of the blissful and intoxicating spring of 1964 for four of us – two inseparable couples…
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Landini said:
Hi John! Speaking of “I Only Want to Be With You” by Dusty (GREAT TUNE!). Do you remember the horrible remake by the (shudder!) Bay City Rollers? Arghhhh! I think that Dusty’s original, along with “Stay Awhile” had a definite Motown vibe to them.
Speaking of the Rollers, I have this horrid memory of watching some TV stupid show in early 76 on a Saturday Night hosted by Howard Cosell. They introduced the Rollers who did (what else?) that horrid “S A T U R D A Y Night” song! Ughh. I remember sitting with my dad & then girlfriend watching in utter horror.
GF was all “Oh aren’t they wonderful just like the Beatles!” I was thinking “Uhhh not quite!” And it hit me at that crucial moment that good Top 40 music had been AWOL since the end of 1972. It was like someone had flipped a switch which wiped out most (but not all) good radio music. Glad I survived!
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John Plant said:
Hello Landini! I have the great good fortune to have NEVER HEARD the Bay City Rollers! in 1972 I was listening more to classical music, but still keeping a weather eye out for new Stevie Wonder, Aretha, Smokey, the Stones… and Dusty. I suppose it was something of a blessing in disguise that I had no car all those years – I had my grandparents’ car for the summers of 1963-64, and my very own car from 1966-68 – which more or less coincides with the Golden Age of car radio, I think. My friends were mostly listening to what might loosely be described as hippie music – and I had no TV – so at least I was spared the ignominy of BCR and their ilk. And Montreal had a fabulous venue for R & B, the Esquire Show Bar, with a horseshoe stage – where I saw the Isley Brothers, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Big Mama Thornton – and (in another venue a block away) a glorious evening with The Sweet Inspirations, fronted by Ollie and the Nightingales – wonderful group with perhaps an unfortunate name.
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The Nixon Administration said:
On which note, I’ll just, um, leave this here.
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John Plant said:
That must be from ‘I Know I’ve Got a Sure Thing’ – one of whose lines is – ‘My dinner is on the table, my baby is in the tub!’
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treborij said:
Nixon, I’ve sold this record by the score in my friend’s record shop. It’s really quite popular….still.
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Robb Klein said:
Sometimes our tastes converge. Sometimes they don’t. This time they don’t. You give it a 9!!! I don’t like this song at all. I’d give it a 3.
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The Nixon Administration said:
Spice of life, and all that. Though I do feel I overrated this a wee bit in the heat of the moment now.
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bogart4017 said:
Some of her material feels like she mioght suffer from “walkabout”. Did you ever, in the middle of sentence, scompletely lose your train of thought? Kinda like that. She caught the “holy spirit” but it left her three quarters of the way in.
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benjaminblue said:
My expectations for this singer and this single were high. After all, I knew that Chris Clark had been compared by some to Dusty Springfield, and I knew that hers were the original versions of two H-D-H songs, Love Gone Bad and Put Yourself In My Place (although the latter is, admittedly, one of my least favorite H-D-H songs), so good things seemed in order.
However, there was no cohesion of Do Right Baby Do Right’s several potentially powerful elements. The initial vocalizing seems vaguely reminiscent of that Aretha would use later on her superior, similarly titled Do Right Woman, Do Right Man or Dr. Feelgood, pulling me in one direction, while the sax backing during the verses almost directly quotes passages of Back In My Arms Again, pulling me in another. And though the instrumentation is muscular, it doesn’t seem to lift the song to a higher place, so it becomes a rather immobile support for whatever is about to happen.
And nothing does happen. The song is repetitious, but there is no discernible destination to which it is chugging. It could have been a 30-second or a 30-minute track; instead, it is precisely 2:44, apparently to fit mid-60s AM radio airplay conventions. It seems rather like a pointless diversion, rather than a tour to discovery.
More positively, there is a nice textural interplay between the tones of the vocal and the sax. It is somewhat grittier than the conversation between Dusty Springfield’s voice and the sax in, for instance, The Look Of Love, a few years later. Still, the closest comparison I can find for this song’s overall effect is that of Chi Coltrane’s Thunder & Lightening, from the early 1970s. Ms. Coltrane and her band made that recording an exciting experience.
Perhaps if I had approached Do Right Baby Do Right chronologically, becoming familiar with it before hearing the later recordings, I would like it more and would find Aretha, Dusty and Chi’s efforts derivative. However, I first heard this song only recently, at about the same time I heard Ms. Clark’s Sweet Lovin’, and while that track, too, suffers in that there is little if any build from the beginning to the end, at least Sweet Lovin’ hints that Ms. Clark had some of the same instincts as Diana Ross, who had amazing dexterity, finding little ways to work around and past the obstacles of challenging, intricate, atmospheric backgrounds. (On the other hand, Ms. Clark’s approach to songs both she and Diana Ross recorded, in particular Whisper You Love Me Boy, find Ms. Clark exercising technique but coming across as insincere.) But as demonstrated on her double CD, Ms. Clark did have her moments. Unfortunately, Do Right Baby Do Right wasn’t one of them.
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