What was The Supremes’ biggest number one hit?
The record label that produced the hit girl group The Supremes, as well as the Motown genre, was very far from picking up the social issues of late-1960s USA for its artistic material.
Berry Gordy was reluctant to gamble a political message on the executive’s most profitable outfit until Dianna Ross and her renewed trio had the makings of a real hit on their hands, and it led him to change his tune.
Motown’s most commercially successful act had had a frilly start, singing about youthful crushes in shiny dresses for mainstream TV, until the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team left the label. The band was suddenly floating on a turbulent sea with an ever-changing captain and no set direction, with inconsistent authorship manifesting in their pop chart success. They had two weakening top ten hits from a loyal audience, followed by a plunge that cut them off from even entering the top 20 for two consecutive songs.
Gordy, their label chief, held a special meeting with writers and producers that would later be called ‘the Clan’ to work on a hit single for the Supremes. Since business hadn’t been going well, the Clan chose to go out on a whim and break away from the group’s usual themes of high school sweethearts and ‘Baby Love’.
Spearheaded by Pam Sawyer, the songwriting team leaned towards raising awareness on the burgeoning topic of teenage pregnancies, intending the girls to sing as if from the point of view of a pregnant adolescent in her fearful plight. When Gordy shut this down, the Clan pivoted to a less direct point of narration, which would have a lower chance of alienating an audience.
“We arrived at a really touching story about a girl who herself was born out of wedlock and is telling her boyfriend she doesn’t want to go the wrong way with him and bring another love child into the world,” Gordy later recalled. That was all in the making of what became ‘Love Child’, the song that transitioned a girlish arrangement into a more universally appreciable music powerhouse, rewarded in both chart positions and sales.
Their blues album Love Child proudly keeps the song’s title in its name, and its daring innovation intrigued audiences to buy it 500,000 times within its first week. The album reached two million copies sold by the end of the year, with ‘Love Child’ becoming the third biggest-selling Supremes’ single behind ‘Someday We’ll Be Together’ and ‘Baby Love’. However, when celebrating the Billboard Top 40 Biggest Girl Groups of All Time on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2015, ‘Love Child’ ranked highest among the Supremes’ entries.
Beyond its crude reminders of the hardships of single motherhood, ‘Love Child’ went above and beyond the usual Motown specs by congregating a string accompaniment with a potent brass section to convey the urgency of their message.
The song shot up to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 list and set up camp nicely at the coveted spot for a whole fortnight. The Supremes would be remembered as the act to finally kick The Beatles off their number-one pedestal, where they had remained for nine weeks with ‘Hey Jude’.
