My song today is ‘You’ve Really Got A Hold on Me’. This song was written by Smokey Robinson and became a 1962 Top 10 hit single for the Miracles on ‘Motown’s Tamla label’. One of the Miracles' most covered tunes, this million-selling song received a 1998 ‘Grammy Hall of Fame Award’. It has also been selected as one of ‘The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll’. It was covered by English rock group the Beatles on their second album, ‘With the Beatles’. Many other musicians also recorded versions.
While in New York in 1962 on business for Motown, Smokey Robinson heard Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring it On Home To Me’ which was in the charts at the time and was so influenced by it that he wrote ‘You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me’ in his hotel room.
"You've Really Got a Hold on Me" has been covered extensively since its release. The most notable include ‘The Supremes’ (1964) and ‘The Temptations’ (1965), among many others.
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When this song was first released, I was less than one year away from emigrating to Canada. I had always wanted to travel before I settled down to getting married and raising a family. After incurring a bad traffic accident at the age of 11 years, when a wagon knocked me down and ran over me, I was awarded a substantial compensation amount by the driver’s insurers. This money made such travel possible for me when I attained the age of majority and could access the money (21 years of age).
One of my dreams was to become a professional singer. A second dream was to travel widely around the American continent. A third dream was to emigrate to Canada with four workmates from Harrison Gardeners Dying Company where I’d worked for six years. In short, five of us had planned to have ‘a lad’s outing’ that was to last at least two years before we all settled down to life and marriage back home in England. I’d held these dreams for several years, and it could be said that ‘they really got a hold on me’.
However, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns once quoted, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. No matter how long and carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it.
The five of us had provisionally agreed to emigrate to Canada in December of 1963. As a gesture, I had agreed to pay the passage of all five of us and they would repay me in Canada when we all secured work. Four of us were of single status and the oldest among us (25 years) had been married but was separated and in the process of getting a divorce.
In February 1963, after a Saturday night out dancing at the Cleckheaton Town Hall, one of the five made out with a young woman from Scholes. After they left the dance, my mate decided to escort his date for the night back home to her parent’s house in Scholes on the last bus. They went to Cleckheaton Bus Station, and like many courting couples at the time, they started kissing and cuddling behind the bus station until their transport arrived.
Behind the Cleckheaton Bus Station was the darkest place a courting couple might stand. In fact, it was so dark that the hidden row could accommodate three couples, none of whom would be able to see what the other two couples beside them were doing in the pitch darkness of the midnight hour; although they could hear them if they listened hard enough.
If couples positioned themselves properly, they could do whatever they wanted to do ‘out of sight’ of other bus passengers queuing out front for their bus. The only danger was when the bus made a ninety-degree turn into the bus station from Bradford Road. Because of the acute angle of its turning, when the arriving bus pulled into the bus station from Bradford Road, it would be without any warning to the courting couples kissing and cuddling behind the station. Being wholly engaged in whatever they were doing, the courting couples would be invariable caught with their pants down as the bus’s headlights would immediately reveal the sight of couples in a state of undress scrambling to save whatever dignity they had remaining.
On the night in question, one of the five potential migrants to Canada received an offer from the girl he was with that he couldn’t refuse. Finding himself unable to withdraw from the offer during the heated passion of the moment, he discovered three months later that he’d made the girl pregnant, and therefore had to withdraw from his planned passage to Canada with us and have a ‘shotgun wedding’ instead.
In the spring of 1963, another of the four remaining migrants dropped out of the Canadian excursion. He’d secured a job in Dewsbury and essentially started going out with another group of workmates. Having changed both job and workmates, he soon sopped being wedded to the idea of foreign travel as he’d once been, and before long, he also dropped out.
By the summer of 1963, there were only three of the initial five remaining; me, a married mate called Peter who was still seeking a divorce, and a workmate called Arthur.
Arthur and I both worked together. We’d been very close friends for many years and often dated in pairs. Over the years, we’d regularly picked girls up at the dance hall, cinemas and sometimes on weekend outings to Blackpool. I recall two young women we met at the seaside once were good enough company to warrant a further weekend visit to meet up with them in their hometown in Cannock Chase. In August of 1963, Artur had got a girl he was dating from Windybank Estate pregnant, and like all young couples of the time, the only honourable thing to do was to get married before the bairn started showing and the neighbours of the girl’s parents started gossiping. As our parents often said in such circumstances, “You’ve made your bed, lad. Now, lie in it!”
So, there were now only two of the original ‘famous five’ left to do the Canadian trip, but as life would have it passion struck once more.
Yes, you’ve guessed it! In late October of 1963, Peter reluctantly had a change of heart and dropped out before I purchased our tickets of passage across the Atlantic Ocean over Christmas 1963 and the New Year of 1964. I never found out the full tale about Peter’s change of heart, except to learn that although he’d been separated from his wife for going on two years, one weekend in late October while drunk, the couple had met up by accident in the ‘Hightown Heights Working Men’s Club’. Both parties finished up the worse for wear and at the end of the evening, they went back home together to their old matrimonial abode. Peter seemingly enjoyed the prospect of having a woman to sleep next to again and the morning after, he decided to reunite with Mary. Soon after, the divorce petition was called to a halt. A few years later, after my return to England from Canada, I sadly learned that Peter had been struck down by a deadly illness and had died prematurely.
‘The Famous Five’ had been whittled down to one, but I had dreamed of going to Canada for years and I’d no intention of changing my plans because my other four travelling buddies had dropped out one by one. I booked my ticket to sail from Liverpool to Nova Scotia during the third week of November, two days before President John K. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, USA.
I obviously held some trepidation about going to a strange country on my own. Travelling to a British Butlins Camp or seaside resort was the more usual thing for many a young man to do in 1963/64, but travelling to another country thousands of miles away was not!
All my anxiety was forgotten however, by the New Year’s crossing on the S.S.Sylvania. I was helped in large measure to place my homesickness to one side by a ship romance I had with a Chinese woman who was nine years older than me. That brief period we spent together on the crossing was passionate to say the least, and far too memorable for us ever to imagine that such a good thing was ever meant to last beyond our moment of ‘love on the high seas’.
We parted friends at Nova Scotia never to see each other again as we went our own ways. For many years during my late teens, I’d made a point of not getting emotionally involved with any young women I dated, as I knew I planned to travel before settling down to a life of domesticity. There was simply no way I was going to change my plans on a trans-Atlantic crossing, however attractive my Chinese romance happened to be.
My Chinese romance didn’t ‘have a hold on me’ and it would be a further year before my heart would be tempted along the path of true love once more.
Love and peace Bill xxx