Song 344: This week on the playlist is the week to hear Love Child by Diana Ross & The Supremes, written by R. Dean Taylor, Frank Wilson, Pam Sawyer, and Deke Richards. In the fall of 1968, not long after I started my HS senior year, this single hit the airwaves, and as much as I might have liked earlier Supremes cuts, I felt like they had just topped all of their previous efforts. In that era I often had trouble picking out the words on a track, and I had enjoyed listening to this record many times before one of my friends expressed moral disapproval at the suggestion of premarital sex wrapped in some of the lines. As the conversation progressed, he also enlightened me about the street meaning of the term love child, which I had never heard before this 45 came along. While a clearer understanding of the message did rattle my ongoing internal religious conflict over enjoyment of the devil’s music, it didn’t dampen my appreciation of Diana’s saga, and when I heard her sing, “Don’t think I don’t want to please you,” I felt quite certain that she did want to please me, which she managed to do very well by the end of the song, with her voice fading into the distance as she repeated, “I’ll always love you.”
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