Marvin Gaye scuttled his dreams of settling into a pop-jazz balladeer mode by cutting this semi-autobiographical, gritty grinder. It grew out of a jam from Marvin and
Mickey, aided by
Berry Gordy suggesting a few strategic piano chords.
Marvin's husky voice on "Stubborn Kind Of Fellow," was, according to Raynoma, "almost as a joke: to him this wasn't the serious kind of music that he truly yearned to do."
Dave Hamilton, the guitarist on the session, read that voice another way: "You could hear the man screaming on that tune, you could tell he was hungry." "Stubborn" proved to be the breakthrough he and the company had been looking for.
Motown's usual background vocalists,
The Andantes, were out of town when these tracks were cut. It fell to
Martha Reeves, the new A&R secretary, to find replacements. "I got this brilliant idea," she recalls, "to call... The Del-Phis!" The group –
Gloria Jean Williamson,
Rosalind Ashford,
Annette Beard and Martha Reeves – had had their own single on Check-Mate in 1961, though the group had effectively folded by this point.
"We stood there with Mickey and Marvin, and he sang his line," Martha recalls. "Gloria was very good at making up backgrounds, and we went,
'Doo-doo-doo-oww!' Marvin was thrilled. He even sang 'Yeah!' to our backgrounds. We complemented each other very well vocally." As he'd done on several other important early Motown triumphs,
Thomas "Beans" Bowles contributed the airy flute solo.
Diana Ross & The Supremes and
The Temptations covered "Stubborn Kind Of Fellow" on their duet album
Together in 1969. A version of "It Hurt Me Too" by Connie Van Dyke was the B-side of her one Motown single in 1963.
~ From the entry for this song in The Complete Motown Singles Volume 2: 1962, liner notes by Bill Dahl and Keith Hughes, © 2005 UMe/Motown Records.
