Come Emmanuel

A friend sent a gift of music a few days ago — included me in the group who receive a digital mixtape from them this time of year. In the set is this ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ cover from Melanie Safka’s 1975 album Sunset and Other Beginnings.

I’d never heard it. My knowledge of Melanie’s oeuvre, I’m sad to say, has never extended much beyond ‘Look What They’ve Done to My Song,’ which saw a lot of airplay, as I recall it, on the kind of station I was allowed to listen to as a kid. (Diana Ross’s ‘Theme from Mahogany’ is a another so distinguished, incidentally — and another whose artist and something of its origin I would only pick up on a lot of years later, long into adulthood.)

This Melanie version of ‘Can’t Hurry Love’ combines it with another top ‘girl group’ hit of the period of The Supremes’ supremacy a decade previous, The Shirelles’ ‘Mama Said.’ It’s a delight. To have grown up with these sounds all around, even in the restricted way I did, and never to have known then this particular recording feels today like cause for embarrassment. How did this item never make its way to me?

Not a question we need dwell on, maybe. But look again. This ‘Can’t Hurry Love’ is a bit more than cute mashup. By the time Phil Collins has his redux hit with it not another full decade later — I was hitting teens — and ever thereafter, ‘Can’t Hurry Love’ seems to be subject to one common kind of treatment. Send-up or homage, ‘Can’t Hurry Love’ covers appear to hew close to the way Motown put the ‘60s chart-topper original together. Not so the Melanie ‘Can’t Hurry Love’ — leaving it a funny outlier from later perspective. There’s no retro cachet angle to be in on when Safka records it. She’s just doing her own version of the thing, a version perhaps not conceived as potential single at all. That it neither sounds very much like the original hit nor dramatically departs from / transforms it is not strange. The track works great — really pretty great! — as just what it is.

This isn’t primarily a post about Safka’s cover, though. It’s a post for dealing, in a certain way, with my greater embarrassment, my more genuinely felt embarrassment, in having till now never known of the song that the Safka track’s original, Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland Supremes mega-hit, inescapable pop fare in the America of my childhood, itself originates from. It’s this that my friend’s gift of music has somehow seemed for me, for a moment, meant to be an introduction to, a revealing of.

There’s nothing obscure about the principal background facts I’m coming to, let’s first notice. People who pay much attention to ’60s pop culture — someone I’m really not — will find it familiar history. Take a minute to scan Wikipedia’s ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ entry, as I was moved to do over the weekend, and you’ll catch it at a glance.

Here’s the Dorothy Love Coates / Gospel Harmonettes 1953 (near as I can tell) recording of her ‘He’s Right on Time,’ as it was titled then and still will be alternately referred to:

And here, a telling of how she came to write it:

I don’t have wherewithal to do in this post what the song in some ways invites, a sustained reflection. But we can observe, at least, that it’s not a simple song. That’s most easily recognized with her last verse,

Some say he’s coming in the morning
And he’s going to make the journey by train;
Some said he’ll be riding in a chariot
Shaped like the angel’s wing.
I don’t know how or when he’ll come,
But don’t let him catch you with your work undone!
He may not come when you want him
But he’s right on time.

A sequence of ideas that at first seem to be straightforwardly about comfort in assurance of divine nearness and care winds up on a note of eschatalogical doubt, one of Christianity’s central (inherited) difficulties. Do I know where I stand? Am I one the Day of the Lord means ultimate rescue for, or am I object to be tested in the instant of consummated justice and found false?

It happens that that verse is left out of a number of the renderings of the song this post gathers, below. This shouldn’t be supposed a defect in those variants, it may be important to say! Reducing the song to something perhaps more definite (heightened in repetition) and clear, on one hand, and filling it out with new material invented or quoted, on the other, would seem to be equally valid interpretive approaches in what is made of this song over the years. And plenty has been made of it. That is the thing here. That’s what I’m appreciating and would wish anybody reading this to gain some appreciation for with me.

The extraordinary reach of Motown’s ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ in the world of my American memory — reach the kind of fundamentalist Christian insularity I was brought up in would never be enough to put one beyond — is in so many ways really the side story, the secondary matter, in music culture terms. The stream this Motown production and (apart from the Melanie cover) its various replica-cover productions is a fantastically commercially fulfilled and at the same time an ossified sort of fork from: there is (or has been or for a long time surely was, at least) the real story musically, the living main flow. That’s a little place of awareness I feel I’ve stumbled from longstanding ignorance into, thanks to somebody wanting me to notice Safka’s 1975 recording this December.

The kind of fundamentalist Christian insularity I was brought up in — a pretty intentionally white kind, though by no means extreme (in American-religion context) in this regard — no doubt does have something to do with my having missed what was always musically the main story here. It doesn’t explain everything, but it certainly is a factor. This obviously deserves further discussion. And yeah, it’ll have to wait.

Give a listen below. A lot of repetition, to be sure — but there’s no repeats.