EVERYBODY NEEDS LOVE + FEELIN’ BLUESY (9841943)

As label debuts go, Gladys Knight And The Pips’ Everybody Needs Love album on Motown is a pretty special one. From the opening title track her manifesto is set; gutsy, emotive gospel inflected soul music delivered through a vocal throbbing with expression backed by the delicious, intuitive harmonies of her cousins Edward Patten and William Guest and her brother Merald. If you need a comparison think the early Miracles cloaked in the Funk Brothers’ tight instrumentation, lavish strings and glorious Norman Whitfield production. It is the album that contains their version of I Heard It Through The Grapevine.

1968’s Feelin’ Bluesy continued where Everybody Needs Love left off. A glorious vehicle for Gladys’ vocal, it features her sublime, poignant take on Kim Weston’s It Should Have Been Me, a Norman Whitfield/Mickey Stevenson penned plea that also landed Yvonne Fair a Top 5 hit in the UK in 1976 when she covered it. There’s also the soaring ballad, Don’t You Miss Me A Little Bit Baby and Robinson’s Your Old Standby. But the highpoint is The End Of Our Road, the affectionate, frenzied musical rewrite of I Heard It Through The Grapevine, also later covered by Marvin Gaye.