“Love is Strange”: The Long Strange Trip of Mickey & Sylvia

Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” became a Top 20 hit in 1957; though innovative enough to influence artists like Jimi Hendrix, the song would be the duo’s only chart success. Sharing the composer credits are Mickey Baker, Sylvia Robinson and Ellas McDaniel, better known as Bo Diddley.

Mickey “Guitar” Baker was an in-demand session player in 1955 when singer Sylvia Vanderpool, then a struggling singer known as “Little Sylvia,” asked Baker for guitar lessons. (Sylvia later became Sylvia Robinson after marrying Joe Robinson.) Baker, 11 years Robinson’s senior, came up with the idea for a duo following the success of Les Paul and Mary Ford. On stage the pair dressed elegantly; they both played guitars as they teased each other in song.

In the studio, writes Dave Marsh, producer Bob Rolontz of RCA’s Groove Records helped create Mickey & Sylvia’s unique sound. “(I)nstead of going in and cutting live, he began to overdub, building up the guitar parts through multi-tracking and repeated recordings. The staid RCA engineers told Rolontz he was crazy. He told them to shut up. The result is the most polished version of the Bo Diddley beat ever pieced together.”

In their biography of Jimi Hendrix, Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek write that “Love Is Strange” was “one of the most influential songs of the period” for the young Hendrix, then an elementary school student working out songs on an old ukelele with one string found by his father while cleaning out someone’s garage. Hendrix’s brother Leon said that after Hendrix heard Mickey Baker’s single-string solo, “he really started to look for some outlet, playing songs and figuring out things on one string.”

Mickey & Sylvia formally broke up by the late 1950s but would occasionally record together until 1965. Sylvia Robinson, who had a 1973 solo hit “Pillow Talk” as Sylvia, became known as “the mother of hip-hop” when she and Joe Robinson formed rap label Sugar Hill Records in 1979. That year the label released “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, which would become widely known as the first mainstream hip-hop success. Robinson would go on to sign Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, whose gritty groundbreaking LP The Message was released in 1982.


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