Review: The Shirelles, “Happy and in Love/Shirelles”

It’s an early “Happy New Year” from Real Gone Music, as the label has just announced its January 6 slate! Look for a full rundown soon on a super slate featuring two classic RCA albums from The Main Ingredient, the complete Atlantic recordings of Jackie Moore (Sweet Charlie Babe), a hilarious (and need we say profane?) comedy classic from Redd Foxx, a vintage 1981 Grateful Dead concert, and two soundtracks from the films of auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky! Full details are coming up, but we’re first taking a look at a recent release from The Shirelles!

The first major female group of the rock and roll era, The Shirelles claimed the first girl group No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Discovered in New Jersey by Florence Greenberg’s daughter Mary Jane, the group laid the cornerstone for Greenberg’s Scepter Records family of labels – later home to Dionne Warwick, B.J. Thomas, Chuck Jackson, Maxine Brown, Ronnie Milsap and The Kingsmen – and paved the way for the Motown revolution with their blend of uptown soul, pop, and street corner harmonies. This potent combination, of course, found the quartet – Shirley Alston, Beverly Lee, Doris Coley (Kenner) and Addie (Micki) Harris – “crossing over” to the predominantly white audience and quietly breaking down barriers of gender and race with an intoxicating series of pop songs from some of the greatest songwriters of all time. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Baby It’s You,” “Soldier Boy” and “Foolish Little Girl” were just a few of the triumphs of The Shirelles. But the times they were a-changin’, and the group’s lawsuit against Greenberg over allegedly unpaid royalties led them to be considered persona non grata around Scepter. With Doris Kenner’s departure in 1966, The Shirelles were a trio, and in 1968, the label dropped them altogether. Further singles followed for Blue Rock, Bell and United Artists before their signing to the venerable RCA label in 1971 for a pair of albums which have just received their first-ever reissues from Real Gone Music and SoulMusic Records on one CD: Happy and in Love and Shirelles.

Happy and in Love aimed for a modern R&B sound and appropriately upped the funk quotient from the girls’ earlier singles. Perhaps it wasn’t a radical enough reinvention to have succeeded in a major way, but Happy, like its follow-up Shirelles, makes for a completely enjoyable listen in this sterling two-for-one package. Producer Randy Irwin assembled the album with tracks culled from Bell and United Artists as well as new recordings. The album’s sole single was “No Sugar Tonight,” a loose and brassy reworking of The Guess Who’s hit single (likely not coincidentally also on RCA). It was backed by a song from The Ice Man, Jerry Butler, written and recorded during his Philadelphia days. “Strange, I Still Love You,” co-written by MFSB member and ace producer-arranger Norman Harris, was swathed in luxuriant strings by arranger George Andrews for The Shirelles; it’s one of the strongest cuts on the LP.

There are other Philly connections on Happy and in Love. A second Jerry Butler song was tackled via the dramatic “Go Away and Find Yourself,” a former Bell Records release co-written with the legendary Kenny Gamble. “Boy You’re Too Young” was written by Gamble with Thom Bell and Archie Bell (no relation to each other or the label!) and has that familiar Philly-soul swing. More urgent is “There’s Nothing in This World,” with strings vying for supremacy with drums, and the Motown/Stax meld of Jr. Walker’s “Gotta Hold On to This Feeling” with Eddie Floyd’s “I’ve Never Found a Boy” (or a “Girl,” in Floyd’s original.)

After the jump: more on Happy and in Love, plus Shirelles!