As I’ve noted before in this blog, I occasionally like to highlight ’60s soul songs that never really made it into the mainstream consciousness, songs later rescued from obscurity by England’s Northern Soul scene. Today’s tune is one of those.
“The Sweetest Thing This Side of Heaven” was released by singer Chris Bartley in July of 1967. It’s a bit of sweet ’60s soul with elaborate orchestration, not unlike what the Temptations were doing at the time, and should have been popular with fans of “My Girl” and similar tunes. (In fact, it sounds an awful lot like “My Girl,” no doubt on purpose.) That the single didn’t chart any higher than it did—and remains relatively little known to this day—is a shame.
The song was written and produced by Van McCoy. McCoy discovered Mr. Bartley, then just 17 years old, and signed him to Vando Records, his own subsidiary of the Cameo-Parkway label. The single rose to #32 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #10 on Billboard’s R&B Singles chart.
Mr. Bartley was a one-hit wonder, releasing this one single and an accompanying same-name album before the Vando label folded. He later signed with Buddah Records and released a solitary single for them (a cover of Barbara Lewis’ “Baby I’m Yours”), but it didn’t chart. Bartley left the music business in the early 1970s but later had a bit of a comeback when he joined the Ad-Libs for a time. He passed away in 2009, age 62.
Van McCoy, of course, had a long and storied history as a writer and producer. He achieved solo success with his 1975 disco hit, “The Hustle.” Van McCoy passed away in 1979 at the too-young age of 39.
