Fontella knew that “Rescue Me” would be a smash.
“I had the demo and those folks wore that demo out,” she recounted. “Every time I’d put it on, they wouldn’t take it off the box. They’d just play it over and over and over.”
Chess Records had made its name in blues, but had brought in a stable of talent that could bring the soul and flair of the Motown sound, including producer Billy Davis, recruited from Detroit, where he had sung with an early incarnation of the Four Tops and collaborated as a songwriter with Motown founder Berry Gordy. Davis, who would go on to help write the Coke jingles that you can’t get out of your head (including “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”), had a knack for knowing what could make a song swing and pop. On Fontella’s previous hit, “Don’t Mess Up a Good Thing,” a duet with Bobby McClure, Davis suggested the tempo that enlivened what had been a flat session, according to McClure. “Do you do the Uncle Willie?” Davis asked, a dance then popular in the Chicago scene. “Let’s put it there.”
Take a minute, now. Put on “Rescue Me.” What a house band they had. There is Maurice White on the drums. He would go on to found Earth, Wind & Fire, but spent more than four years as a session drummer at Chess, what he called “Chess University,” keeping time behind Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. On the bass, his future Earth, Wind & Fire collaborator Louis Satterfield. Saxophonist Gene “Daddy G” Barge led the horn section, added after the initial recording, which included a turn from Satterfield on the trombone. The elements layer and build—guitar, organ, piano. Backing vocals from the Gems, featuring then-seventeen-year-old Minnie Riperton, who also did a stint as a receptionist at the studio.
And Fontella. When I listen to her performance, I forget altogether that the material here is a milquetoast love story. In her voice, “Rescue Me” has an everyday urgency, a defiant joy. Like a kind of prayer.
I’m forty-two years old, driving my daughter Marigold, who has just turned four, home.
“Rescue me!” she shouts from her car seat.
I put it on. “On repeat,” she adds. On repeat, on repeat: her request and refrain. Just as a joke, if funny once, is funny a thousand times—if she loves a song, she loves it again and again. Her demands are insistent and urgent, her preferences specific and enduring. For the whole month of June, she woke up every morning wanting to hear “Dreams” by the Cranberries; in July, it was “Rescue Me.” (I try to be strategic about my suggestions. I thought that I could not tire of TLC’s “Waterfalls.” I was wrong.)