Walk with me

Levi Stubbs spent the sixties pleading at the top of his range — “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, “Bernadette”, “Standing in the Shadows of Love”. On “Still Water (Love)” he finally gets to exhale. Smokey Robinson wrote it with producer Frank Wilson to open the Four Tops’ 1970 album Still Waters Run Deep, and it moves exactly like its title: calm on the surface, all the feeling underneath.

The invitation is the whole hook — “walk with me, take my hand” — and the record answers with a ripple instead of the old Motown punch. The single reached number 11 in America, but the album around it opened a bigger door: Still Waters Run Deep is often cited as a direct inspiration for Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, whose title track began with the Tops’ own Obie Benson. You can hear the hinge turning here first.

The clip above is Stubbs and the Tops doing it live in the seventies, that huge voice held deliberately in reserve. Put it on at the end of a loud day. Take the hand.