Things didn’t improve much for the women Wright portrayed in her songs as we dig deeper into her catalogue.
But the twist with “Is It You, Girl?” was that the woman in that situation was out having her own fun, something the other girls in Wright’s stories could not claim. Given her previous hits, Wright might as well have been asking herself the question. “Can you swear it’s you?”Īn 18-year-old Betty Wright performs her first two top-10 soul hits on Soul Train in 1972. In the fourth of those – a 1972 top-20 “Clean Up Woman” soundalike called “Is It You, Girl?” – Wright asks rhetorically “who’s satisfying all your man’s love needs” when you’re out doing your stuff? “Is it you, girl?,” she asks. Perhaps the warnings Wright gave on “Girls” should’ve been heeded by the protagonists in her future hits, because she found herself on the wrong side of various love triangles in each of the four biggest recordings she had before her 19th birthday. In that song, which she recorded when she was only 14 years old, Wright warned other girls of the perils of trying to match guys who “wander” and “go out and play sometimes.” She told them, you can’t do what the guys do “and still be a lady,” while seemingly letting guys off the hook by alerting girls of the painful risks they take when they give their love away to a man whose “least little wrong seems like dirt.”
#BETTY WRIGHT SONGS LIST FREE#
She had already laid the foundation for her scorned woman persona by giving men a free pass with her first hit, “Girls Can’t Do What the Guys Do,” a 1968 single that reached the top 40 on both the pop and soul charts. That Wright had consecutive hits about the hired help who provided more in-home services than just floor-sweeping and diaper-changing was probably no accident. 2 on Billboard’s soul chart, including six weeks behind Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Betty Wright’s “Clean Up Woman” spent a record-setting eight weeks at No. Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough for the young singer, the follow-up single, “Baby Sitter” – a cautionary tale about another experience with a 16-year-old sitter who shows up at her house in a skirt “up to her waist” and “a truckload of you know what, and all of it in place” – became Wright’s second consecutive top-10 soul chart hit in 1972.
2 on Billboard’s Soul Singles chart beginning Christmas Day of 1971 and lasting until Valentine’s Day 1972 behind two soul and pop classics – Sly & the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” and Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”Īnd while Sly Stone and Al Green sang of relationships with perspectives spanning both infidelity and commitment, respectively, Betty Wright’s runner-up hit vividly painted a picture from the woman’s point of view, a woman who in this case realized she was making it too easy for another woman – the maid – to make moves on her man. “Clean Up Woman” was easily Wright’s biggest hit, spending an agonizing eight weeks at No. When news of soul music icon Betty Wright’s death hit the music world on Mother’s Day, the first song many of us thought of was her signature tune, “Clean Up Woman,” that 1971 classic about the hired porter who – when it came to Betty’s man – had more on her mind than washing his dishes and folding his clothes. lected>a.pg-vertical-entertainment.pg-section.
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