GAYE Old Motown May (Marvin Gaye) Top Ten: How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) (#3)

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Memorial Day weekend is known as the “unofficial start of summer” in America. It feels more like November out there right now!!! Overcast, drizzly, and barely in the 50s?! I’ll just stay inside and listen to great music, thank you! That include Marvin Gaye, and here’s one of his big hits that you might know..... #3: How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) ....By someone else. That “someone else” would be James Taylor, who had a top five hit with his MOR rendition in 1975. While I generally like Taylor’s rendition for what it is, I don’t like what it did. It made every MOR singer think he or she could just go pluck any song out of the Motown catalog, sing like a typical white MOR singer would, and release it as a hit. I’m talking about you, Rita Coolidge and your version of Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher”!!! (Of course, Taylor himself got pigeonholed into pretty lame covers thanks to this song.) So never mind JT and his version. Let’s go back to the beginning. Many of you who are a little younger than I am might not know Jackie Gleason had a “catch phrase” that was NOT a line out of Smokey and the Bandit (like “sumb/itch” or “I’m gonna barbecue your ass in molasses!”). No, his show’s opening statement was, “How sweet it is!!!” So Holland/Dozier/Holland took that phrase and built this classic song around it! If you’re only used to Taylor’s rendition it might take you a while to get re-acclimated to it after listening to the original. How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) Written by Holland/Dozier/Holland From How Sweet It Is to Be Loved By You, 1964 You were better to me than I’ve been to myself: