How Barbara McNair’s Motown deep-cut was rediscovered by northern soul obsessives
Being a northern soul fan isn’t just about buying a few records, doing a few backdrops, and listening to Frank Wilson; it is more akin to musical archaeology, uncovering lost soul gems from the brink of obscurity. That practice, much like the northern soul scene, has never truly dissipated, and the resurgence of Barbara McNair is a prime example of that fact.
You might never have heard the name Barbara McNair, but you have almost certainly heard her voice or seen her face on a multitude of occasions over the decades. Her career, after all, stretched across five decades, either as a recording artist, performer, or actor, seeing her appear in the likes of They Call Me Mister Tibbs! among various other works that never quite managed to rocket her to the stardom of some of her co-stars.
In a move that was strange, even by the standards of label boss Berry Gordy, Motown offered McNair a contract in 1965, by which time she had already established herself as a budding fixture of stage and screen. Her recording career had begun the previous decade, with 1958’s ‘Till There Was You’ marking her first hit, and in the years that followed, she boasted a solid career touring her pop-jazz offerings across the nation, touring with Nat King Cole.
By the time she arrived at Motown, the label was rapidly becoming the most powerful hit-making factory in the States, and it was beginning to branch out to the UK market, too. Despite her pre-existing star power, though, McNair’s recording career never quite settled into the Motown roster. In total, she released on LP, 1966’s Here I Am, and five singles during her brief spell at Hitsville USA, none of which managed to challenge the supremacy of The Supremes or The Four Tops.
When the vocalist left the label during the late 1960s, she might have assumed that nobody would ever listen to that period of her discography again. What she didn’t count on, however, was the explosion of northern soul in places that she’d likely never heard of – Blackpool, Manchester, and Wigan being the main offenders.
With the emergence of northern soul came the sudden worship of previously forgotten, rare Motown and soul records that had flopped upon release, including McNair’s ‘You’re Gonna Love Me Baby’, released by Gordy’s label back in 1965 to little fanfare. Even more unexpected than the track’s rediscovery, however, was the newfound audience for McNair’s soul-slanted output.
Not long after the northern soul scene started to take root, record collectors and DJs became aware of the fact that Motown was sitting on a wealth of unreleased material in its vaults, prevented from basking in the fresh air of the pop charts by Motown’s quality control department. Numerous McNair recordings fell into that category, and so the competition to uncover those lost anthems within the northern soul realm was sparked.
A few of those unreleased tracks made it onto acetate discs, scratchy bootlegs, or mysterious cassette tapes, but it wasn’t until 2004 that Barbara McNair’s Motown magnum opus, ‘I Know Better’, was finally rescued from the vaults. Released on the exhaustive UK-only compilation album, The Ultimate Motown Collection, the release seemed almost tailor-made for those northern soul obsessives who had been chasing it for years.
Since that release, the song has found a rightful home as a staple of the 21st-century northern soul scene, reigniting the light of McNair’s musical excellence, which did not always receive the praise or attention it deserved all those years ago.
