Barbara Mason – Love’s The Thing CD (Soul Brother)

‘Hello may I speak to Barbara…. Barbara this is Shirley’, is the opening line from one of the all time great Soul tracks about a love triangle. It was a massive hit for Shirley Brown in 1974 selling a million copies in eight weeks by December of that year. Bettye Crutcher and Lester Snell wrote an answer song ‘From His Woman to you’ for ‘Lady Love’ Barbara Mason. It also became a massive hit reaching No 3 on the R&B chart and entering the Billboard Top 30, Barbara’s biggest record of the 70’s.

Barbara retained the Southern Soul part monologue/part sung sound for the follow up single ‘Shackin Up’ ,another top 10 R&B hit. These tracks marked a change of direction for Barbara whose previous albums had been recorded in Philadelphia. ‘Loves the Thing’ was recorded at United Sound Studios in Detroit in 1975. It would be the forth and last album she recorded for Buddah and also the last with her then Husband, Manager and Producer Jimmy Bishop.

Unusually Barbara only wrote 3 of the songs on this album, one of them ‘He Wants The Two Of Us’ a co-write with Bettye Crutcher. Four of the songs were written by the song writing team of  Jerry Aikens, Reginald Turner and Victor Drayton from the Formations group along with Johnny Bellmon. The strongest of these is the Detroit dancer ‘ (There’s) One Man Between Us’, a track that sounds right for today’s Modern soul scene.

‘Love’s The Thing’ was more successful than Transition reaching no 42 in the R&B album charts, a feat that none of her subsequent albums for a variety of labels ever achieved. – Soul Brother