shop around

After such a fun time at Hard French, I have been digging through my CD collection and ripping more of my old Motown collections. I have a lot of compilation sets and "Best Of"s but really only listened to the songs I already knew I liked, and I started ripping CDs back in the day when the biggest hard drives were only 500 MB and ripping took a long time using MusicMatch, so I only ripped tracks I knew I wanted. I've started ripping entire CDs now and am enjoying discovering songs I never listened to before. Some songs fall too far on the mellow end of scale for me to really enjoy while in a good mood (I don't think of Motown as being so sad so much of the time), but many tracks have already been marked for addition to my party playlists.

One song I heard on this morning's commute was a bit of a shock. It's "Don't Let Him Shop Around" by Debbie Dean. It's basically the opposite of the story in "Shop Around" made famous by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (and I suppose later by Captain & Tennille). And it has basically the same tune. I had no idea that "Shop Around" was originally recorded by a woman who sings of her mother's lesson to keep her man and not let him shop around, and was reworked the other way and made into a hit.

Well, a little Internet later and now I know my assumption was very wrong. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles did have a huge hit with "Shop Around, " and Debbie Dean (Motown's first white singer) recorded an answer song in response to "Shop Around," called "Don't Let Him Shop Around." And apparently such "answer songs" were pretty common and rather popular.

Still a bit esoteric, but a fun bit of music trivia. And worth a listen.