A friend included me in a multi-person e-mail, lamenting the death of a writer of popular R&B songs. He wrote that he’d just heard of the man’s death and noted that Lamont Dozier had written his all-time favorite song: “I Can’t Help Myself.” (The song is subtitled “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch.”) My friend has nostalgic gatherings on his front porch, where we are invited to sip bourbon and smoke cigars. When I saw his lovely bride at the Irvington Farmers Market — or as my youngest granddaughter termed it, “Vegetable Town” – I told her to convey to her spouse my desire to come sit on the porch with him. What I did not say was that I was going to belt out his favorite song for him.
The opening line to my friend’s song begins, “Sugar pie honey bunch, you know that I love you…” Dozier was part of the songwriting team of Holland Dozier Holland that produced it, and the song was set loose on the world in 1965, with Levi Stubbs singing lead for The Four Tops. My eldest daughter will tell you that she grew up listening to me singing songs by the Four Tops and making attempts to match Levi’s great voice. She calls me still, and with a Four Tops song playing in the background, will say to me, “Sing it dad!” Anyone who has known me for at least 38 seconds will be able to tell you that I like to sing, and I am not shy about it. My high school friends and I formed a singing group and sometime in the mid-sixties, performed a 1961 release by the R&B group Don And Juan, called “What’s Your Name?” I sang a soaring section of the song, and the next week in the locker room as I prepared to be abused by the beefy brothers of the football team, one of the massive linemen turned to me and said, “I didn’t know you had a voice like that.” I put my head down, hoping that he would not mash me harder than he had in every other practice, but secretly pleased to have my singing skills recognized.
I grant you that there is a degree of hubris in my blatherings about my singing. When I leave my favorite cidery, I sing the first two lines of a song that Natalie Cole sang, called “I Wish You Love.” The song has a storied history, having originally been written and recorded in France, and since covered by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Gloria Lynne, and Nancy Wilson. It is the Natalie Cole version that I remember as I croon to the servers at the cidery: “Goodbye: No use leading with our chins/This is where our story ends/Never lovers, ever friends…” I’ve yet to get to the point where I “wish (them) bluebirds in the Spring…”
Lamont Dozier left us with many joys, including the lively song, “Bernadette.” I can hear Levi screaming out her name and I’ve tried to imitate that cry in much the same way. But when I get to my friend Ken’s front porch, I will need no sip of his bourbon to sing to him and his bride. I sing, therefore, I am. I have sung in weddings and church choirs and bars and restaurants; no reverberating hollow can escape my outcry. There’s a song in my heart, and should that fair señorita reject it, I’ll sing to the mule.
Get ready Ken: I’m gonna sing about that sugar pie, that honey bunch. I can’t help myself. I really cannot.
cjon3acd@att.net