Frank Wilson

Article by Rob Jones

'Tell Me Baby'

Note: This old article from 2008 which I've recently salvaged from my archive and updated primarily deals with the confusion surrounding the song 'Tell Me Baby' credited to Frank Wilson as the singer.

Regarded by many as one of the greatest Motown discoveries of all time, but was Frank Wilson really the singer?

When I first heard this song many moons ago, my impression was that it was certainly an amazing unreleased version of the Vows classic 'Tell Me', although after a few plays something didn't seem quite right. The vocal over the powerhouse production did resemble Frank Wilson, and by comparison it kind of put the Vows version in the shade. It sounded completely authentic as a sixties Motown track, but was it actually real? The only way to find out was to ask Frank Wilson himself - and what Frank had to say was quite surprising.

Frank and I had been in touch for some time, so I contacted him with a view to getting some info about the tune and to let him know it had suddenly appeared and was doing the rounds here in the UK. Frank told me that he'd originally recorded a demo version at his home in Los Angeles and sent it off to Motown, only to have it rejected and he was surprised sometime later when he learned about the Vows release, as Motown hadn't informed him of this.

What I found particularly interesting about the track was that Frank had been able to achieve such a high production standard from a demo recorded in his living room, but he then told me his demo was a very simple recording with a friend of his playing the backing track on an organ. Obviously then, Motown must have bedded his vocal over a studio backing track - but that seemed unlikely when they could have simply called him into the studio rather than use a home recording of his voice which wouldn't have met their quality control standards anyway. It was a bit of a mystery, so I sent the song over to Frank to see if he could shed any light on it.

When Frank contacted me again, there was one thing he could say about it for sure - it definitely wasn't him singing and he couldn't identify the voice. Our best guess was that Motown had test recorded the song with another vocalist and it had been shelved as a master tape with Frank's name on it as the composer, and this is what had probably caused the track to be mistakenly credited to him as the singer when the master resurfaced all those years later. This was the only explanation that made sense if the track was indeed real. I discussed the song with several leading soul experts over the years; none of whom were able to identify the real singer, plus I'd informed numerous DJs that it wasn't Frank, but nevertheless the bootleg copies continued to be played under his name.

The mystery was finally solved some years later when a studio-connected friend finally identified it as the Versatiles who changed their name to the 5th Dimension in 1965, which indicates it may have been a very early recording made around the time of the Vows release on V.I.P.

         

Footnote:

Aside from Frank's song 'Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)' being the most valuable soul record of all time, he was inadvertently the inspiration behind records such as Jackie Lee's 'Oh My Darlin', 'Gonna Hang On in There Girl' by Jesse Davis, Bobby Garrett's 'My Little Girl' and 'Don't Pretend' by the Belles to name but a few. These songs were penned by Sherlie Matthews and written about her relationship with Frank at the time. 'My Little Girl' was originally recorded by Sherlie as 'My Sugar Baby', but at a slower register than the red vinyl bootleg released in 1975. Simon Soussan was often blamed for speeding the track up for that release, but when Sherlie had received the original finished studio copy many years before, it was the same faster version - suggesting that the culprit was actually Fred Smith.

Frank Wilson (December 5th, 1940 - September 27th, 2012)