MARV JOHNSON- Don't Leave Me

There was a period in the late 50s and early 60s when a small group of producers/songwriters including the likes of Leiber and Stoller, Curtis Mayfield and Berry Gordy, working with the cream of the early soul singers, would occasionally produce slow, haunting, exotic ballads featuring choral backings, baroque string arrangements and yearning lyrics, often about dreams or fantasies; songs that in lesser hands would have sounded like middle of the road slush, and with the coming of the British invasion would soon sound weirdly antiquated, but nevertheless stand as shimmering, sublime, other worldly things of beauty. I'm talking about records like 'What A Diff'rence A Day Makes' by Dinah Washington, 'On The Horizon' by Ben E. King or 'Isle of Sirens' by Jerry Butler. Along side these records I would place the sublime (I know, I've said sublime already, but it really is the best word for these records) 'Don't Leave Me' by Marv Johnson, co-written by Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson and produced by Mr Gordy back in 1959.

I've owned a British, London pressing of this record for 15 years, one which I've played countless times despite a huge crack down one side of the record- I simply stuck a piece of sellotape across the other side and it played ok (those London records were made to last!), but I was nonetheless happy to pick up this Australian copy for a dollar- though I do hate the plastic company sleeves that seem to have been popular with Australian record companies.

Of course as the 60s went on Curtis Mayfield and various Mowtown staffers would refine and modernise this type of ballad (The Temptation's 'Just My Imagination (Running A Way With Me)' for example, is almost a sequel to 'Don't Leave Me') and in Britain the Walker Brothers would remake it for swinging London, but personally I miss the unique atmosphere of the earlier productions.

MARV JOHNSON- Don't Leave Me