A breath of fresh air which sounds like the début from some new talent, the jumping-off point for a new and exciting career. Certainly it doesn’t sound like what it really was: a final, half-hearted throw of the dice from a disinterested label, one of America’s great unsung singers shackled to a record company who didn’t bother to release her records. (7)
Hattie Littles, the most unjustly forgotten of all Motown’s early heroines, still doesn’t have a proper anthology collecting together the reams of material she apparently cut at Motown; on the off chance anyone at Ace/Kent is reading, we can but hope such a project emerges soon. In the meantime, as legacies go, things could have been far worse.(7)
If the A-side had seemed like a conscious attempt to reposition Hattie away from being a blues artist and towards a more R&B/pop place, then this takes things considerably further: it sounds like something that could have been cut by Mary Wells. (8)
Not really blues in itself, it’s at the outer edges of blues-flavoured R&B balladry – but it’s still not really all that commercial. (7)
Interesting, fast-paced fun, too slight to be a single in its own right, but a good opportunity for singer and band to let their hair down; I’m just very intrigued to know what it sounded like before Hattie got to record it. (6)
Hattie could take heart in the fact she wouldn’t be the last Motown artist to suffer such a fate, and she’d be in some pretty good company. (6)
Motown Junkies 