It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “Baby Love” by The Supremes
November 4, 1964
“Baby Love” by The Supremes
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100, October 31 – November 27, 1964
“Where Did Our Love Go” was the Supremes’ 10th single, but it may as well have been their first. After years spent as the joke of Motown — the “No-Hit Supremes” — songwriters/producers Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland revamped the group’s sound by stripping it to the basics. Over the course of its two minutes and 40 seconds, “Where Did Our Love Go” contains no chorus, no key changes, no elaborate instrumentation, no complex harmonies, no vocal calisthenics. The song is defined by a rudimentary 4/4 beat hammered out with foot stomps and handclaps. Diana Ross bemoans a lost love in her typical little-girl voice, yet there’s also a seductive edge to her performance, as though she’s trying to entice him back. Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson’s alluring coos of “baby, baby” and “where did our love go?” in the background heighten this dichotomy.
The potent simplicity of “Where Did Our Love Go” must have seemed refreshing to American audiences, who sent the single to the top of the pop charts for two weeks in August 1964. Suddenly, the group was transformed from Motown’s biggest joke to its star act. Both the trio and their label must have been relieved to finally break the losing streak, yet even greater success lay just around the corner.
When devising a follow-up single for the Supremes, Holland-Dozier-Holland stuck by Motown’s “same old song” policy of repeating what worked and not messing too much with the formula. “Baby Love” is a blatant retread of “Where Did Our Love Go,” with the same rhythm, identical handmade (and footmade) percussion, similar subject matter, and ultra-basic song structure. It even reprises the brief saxophone break in the middle of the previous song.
Yet “Baby Love” also improves on its forerunner by adding some twists to the formula. Its dynamic melody features about as many chord changes in each line as “Where Did Our Love Go” had in each verse. While “Baby Love” still doesn’t have a true chorus, its verses are split into A and B sections that add some variety, contrasting emphatic pleas (“my baby love, oh how I need you”) with quieter entreaties (“instead of breaking up, let’s do some kissing and making up”). A fake key change between the third and fourth verses ups the drama. Most effectively, Ballard and Wilson supplement their “baby, baby” harmony vocals with a gently insistent “don’t throw our love away,” which not only adds a nice counterpoint to Ross’s lead vocal melody, but provides the song with its most memorable hook.
While retreads of hits usually fall prey to the law of diminishing returns, “Baby Love” bucks the trend by not only being a better song, but a bigger hit. The single surpassed “Where Did Our Love Go” by topping the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks, making the Supremes the first Motown act to score a second #1 pop record. The group would eventually release 12 #1 hits over the coming decade, becoming not only Motown’s biggest act of the 1960s, but the most successful American vocal group ever.
The Supremes’ later hits would be more complex and hook-filled than “Baby Love,” but none would spend longer at the top of the charts. But while “Baby Love” may not be the Supremes’ best single, it’s perhaps their most important. It established that the group was more than a one-hit wonder, and showed how gradually building on a template could craft an identity and sustain a career.
The popularity of the Supremes had wider repercussions as well. Their success solidified Motown’s place in the pop landscape, leading to scores of other African-American artists to crossover into the mainstream — not just those recording in Detroit, but those with “deeper” soul sounds as well. The Supremes and their soul-pop peers were also the rare American artists able to withstand the invasion of the British beat groups, perhaps because both were working from the same formulas: blending R&B and mainstream pop to create a hybrid music appealing to a wide range of listeners, regardless of race.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
