The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits
The Billboard charts have a currency acknowledged around the world. The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, written by Adam White and Fred Bronson, pays tribute to many of those who helped to create a quarter-century of unimpeachable music: singers, songwriters, musicians, producers and more – even some of the record executives whose hustle delivered the hits and sent them to the soul summit.
“Through hundreds of interviews with the musicians, producers and songwriters involved in the making of such classics as “Respect,” “Rainy Night In Georgia” and “One Nation Under A Groove,” it provides a fascinating insight into the sound of black America”
Excerpt
BOOGIE ON REGGAE WOMAN
Stevie Wonder
Tamla 54254
Writer: Stevie Wonder
Producer: Stevie Wonder
December 28, 1974 (2 weeks)
As the first and second singles, respectively, from Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale album, the polemics of “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” gave way to the carefree celebration of “Boogie On Reggae Woman.”
Both were huge hits on the Hot 100 and R&B best-seller lists, helping the album to become Wonder’s first chart-topping pop LP since Recorded Live! The 12 Year Old Genius in 1963. It was fitting that the cover art of Fulfillingness featured illustrations of Dr. Martin Luther King and JFK — symbols of ‘63 — alongside depictions of gold discs, Grammy awards and a Motortown Revue tour bus.
Judging by the logsheets kept by Wonder’s associate producers, Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff, he got started on “Boogie On Reggae Woman” in 1973, around the same time as “Jesus Children of America,” which appeared on his previous album, Innervisions. “Three new tunes (untitled),” declares the Cecil/Margouleff log, identifying them as “jazz tune,” “words unheard,” and “Hello Jesus,” plus a fourth, “Bogey [sic] on Reggae Woman.”
Wonder was so prolific, of course, that “Hello Jesus” could have been an entirely different song than “Jesus Children of America.” Cecil says, “We didn’t record albums, we recorded songs. When it was time to put an album out, it was, ‘What songs have we got?’ We spent a lot of time figuring out what would work after which song, what tempos would work, blending them together. We would argue and push and say, ‘You’ve got to have this one,’ and so on, but Stevie had the final say.”
Margouleff agrees. “He never really worked toward creating an album project, he’d just write for a library, for a body of work, then we’d draw from the library. We’d go to [attorney] Johanan Vigoda’s office — I remember he had three or four dead plants on his desk — and pick songs. No bodyguards, no business people, no one hovering. It was very quiet — and very musical.” Margouleff calls “Boogie On Reggae Woman” one of his favourite songs. “It was supposed to go on Innervisions,” he says, “it was created at that time. That was a library pull: I argued to get it on Fulfillingness.”
Wonder was constantly creating, whether at Mediasound or Electric Lady in New York, or at Record Plant in Los Angeles. So Cecil and Margouleff were constantly on call. “It would be whatever Stevie felt like working on that day or that night,” says Cecil. “We would go in, and if Stevie wasn’t around, that’s when Bob and I would mix. [Stevie] would say, ‘I can’t get in [to the studio], I’m in Detroit and I’m with this lady. Why don’t you mix so-and-so?”
Wonder’s extraordinary four-year, four-album partnershi with his two wizards ended with Fulfillingness’ First Finale. “The only contract we ever had with Stevie was the one to stop working with him,” says Cecil. And as a curtain-closer, the LP took the 1974 Grammy as Album of the Year — just as Innervisions had taken the 1973 prize.