You Can't Hurry Love: A Gospel Hymn, Phil Collins' Clone and The Chicks

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You Can't Hurry Love began, as this episode traces it, with a 1950s gospel song by Dorothy Love Coates and the Original Gospel Harmonettes about waiting on divine timing. Holland-Dozier-Holland turned that idea into a mother's advice to her daughter about romance and cut it for The Supremes A' Go-Go in the summer of 1966 in Studio A at Hitsville U.S.A. Diana Ross sang lead with Mary Wilson and Marlene Barrow behind her, over the Funk Brothers: Earl Van Dyke on piano, Robert White on guitar, James Jamerson on bass, Benny Benjamin on drums and Jack Ashford on tambourine. The hosts point to the irony of a song about patience set to a sprinting tempo.

In 1982 Phil Collins and producer Hugh Padgham set out to make a forensic copy for Hello, I Must Be Going, and found that early 1980s studios, with isolated booths and pristine consoles, filtered out the bleed and grit of the Hitsville room. Collins played the drums himself in the spirit of Benny Benjamin, added tambourine and recorded live strings at CBS studios in London rather than use synthesizers. His version topped the UK chart for two weeks in January 1983, beating the Supremes' UK peak of No. 3. In 1999 The Chicks took the song onto the country chart through the Runaway Bride soundtrack.

• Jamerson played with one finger on heavy flatwound strings he refused to change, placing notes just ahead of or behind the beat.
• Ashford's tambourine was pitched to cut through the static of cheap car radios.
• The hosts debate whether Motown was a cold assembly line or a room where the groove could not be manufactured.
• Collins' cover was his first US top 10 solo single, reaching No. 10, and hit No. 1 in Ireland, Canada and the Netherlands; its video earned a Grammy nomination.
• The Supremes' original sits in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of 500 songs that shaped rock and roll.