Betty Wright: I Love The Way You Love - 1972
Betty Wright's halcyon years were 1972-74 when she released a succession of raunchy-ish soul songs, in the fashion of Ann Peebles and Millie Jackson, often railing at unfaithful, feckless lovers or shamelessly confronting the wives whose husband she is dallying with, as if she is the innocent party!
Her funky, soulful signature single, Clean Up Woman, the most well-known track on this album, is very much in this vein, as also is the excellent, Millie Jackson-ish Secretary, from 1974 and the similar gripe at a perceived love rival in Baby Sitter, from Hard To Stop. Girl you gotta look out for those other girls! Don't you turn your back now.
Betty has progressed from the semi-innocent young girl not wanting to be taken advantage of from her first album. Here she is, some four years later, an experienced lover, not wanting to give an inch to her many bedroom rivals, it seems - clean up women, secretaries, babysitters. Why, they're all out to take your man, Betty, like a line of female equivalents to the woman-stealing "Jody" character.
I Love The Way You Love, the title track, is polished soul of the highest order and just sounds bloody marvellous with that coal mine-deep bassline as does the sumptuous soul of I'll Love You Forever Heart And Soul. I Found That Guy finds Betty positive about relationships for one of the first times thus far.
This album is probably the smoothest of the four that I have covered here having an overall lovely warm depth to its sound. There is, though, an upbeat Motown style number in If You Don't Love Me Like You Say You Love Me that is pretty damn irresistible. Add the deep, late-night funky soul of I'm Getting Tired Baby to the list of quality cuts too.
Pure Love is as its title suggests, a loved-up smooth number, but things take a turn for the worse for Betty on the string-enhanced soul of Don't Let It End This Way as she gets her heart broken. The closing ballad Let's Not Rush Down The Road Of Love sees her tentatively back on track though.
Betty covers the much-covered Bill Withers song Ain't No Sunshine on here, but the quality of the rest of the album's eleven tracks are of such a high standard that its presence seems a bit unnecessary and dare I say it for such a good song, thematically superfluous.
You can't argue with a title like All Your Kissin' Sho' Don't Make True Lovin' either, can you? The track is suitably funky as hell as well.
