"You Give Good Love" is the debut solo single by American singer Whitney Houston for her 1985 eponymous debut studio album. The song was written by La Forrest 'La La' Cope and produced by Kashif. Originally offered to Roberta Flack, it was one of the first songs recorded for Houston's debut album.
The song was released on February 22, 1985 as the album's leading single. The release of "You Give Good Love" was originally designed to give Houston a noticeable position and standing within the black music market first, eventually topping the US R&B singles charts on both Billboard and Cashbox.
The song was also an unexpected crossover pop hit, peaking at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Houston's first of what would be many Top 10 hits. It was later certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The song also was successful in Canada, where it gave Houston her first top ten single there. In other countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, its success in those countries were more moderate.
The song won Favorite Soul/R&B Single at the 13th American Music Awards and was nominated for Best R&B Song and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance at the 28th Annual Grammy Awards in 1986.
The music video for the song, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, shows Houston performing at a club and a photographer focusing his camera on her.
Houston performed the song on various TV shows and awards ceremonies such as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The 1985 R&B Countdown and The 1st Soul Train Music Awards of 1987, as well as on her first three tours and select dates of The Bodyguard World Tour (1993–94) and My Love Is Your Love World Tour (1999).
"You Give Good Love" is also featured on four of Houston's compilation albums, Whitney: The Greatest Hits (2000), Love, Whitney (2001), The Essential Whitney Houston (2011) and I Will Always Love You: The Best of Whitney Houston (2012).
Background
Born in Newark, New Jersey and later raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Whitney Houston was the youngest child of gospel and rhythm and blues singer Cissy Houston. By her teen years, Houston was leading the junior church choir at Newark's New Hope Baptist Church and doing background session work for artists such as Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls among others.
After hiring Tara Productions founders Eugene Harvey and Seymour Flics to manage her professional career in 1981, Houston began seeking a record deal, auditioning for the record labels Elektra and Epic Records in 1982. Following guest appearances on albums by Material and Paul Jabara, Houston signed an exclusive contract with Clive Davis' Arista label in April 1983.
To pique producers' interest in giving the singer songs to record, Houston, Davis and Arista A&R Gerry Griffith presented showcases in both New York and Los Angeles nightclubs. One of the producers, Kashif, who was also signed to Arista, accepted Davis' invitation to see Houston's New York club performance.
Kashif admitted disappointment in viewing the singer's show, comparing it to a "lounge act", admitting he wasn't used to producing "cabaret singers". Undeterred, Davis sent Kashif a videotaped clip of Houston's performance of "Home" from The Wiz on The Merv Griffin Show, to which Kashif was impressed by. Around this time, a songwriter who had just got signed to Kashif's music publishing company named La Forrest 'La La' Cope, a fellow musician and then attending Juilliard School, sent him a demo of a ballad she had written titled "You Give Good Love".
A demo tape of the song had been initially sent to Cope's idol, soul singer Roberta Flack, who she explained, had "expressed familiarity with her work" and wanted the songwriter to pen a song for her after the two met during Flack's tour with Kashif as her opening act. Cope penned two other songs during this period - "Livin' for Your Love" and "Show Me", which would be recorded that same year by artists Melba Moore and Glenn Jones respectively. Both songs became R&B hits, peaking in the top ten on the R&B chart in 1984.
Cope sent a demo tape of the song to Flack after she wrote in the middle of her writing an assignment from Julliard. The songwriter was reportedly sick and under the weather when she brought her tape to the Dakota apartment Flack was staying at in Manhattan. When she called Flack's office to receive word about the demo, the songwriter was rebuffed by Flack's assistant with an angry "don't call us, we'll call you" retort, leaving Cope upset. After Kashif heard the song at his apartment in New York City, a light bulb came out in his mind that flashed "hit! hit!" Kashif then advised Cope to rewrite the song for Houston and "make it a double entendre".
Recording and composition Kashif called Griffith after hearing Cope's demo and told him, "I think I have a song for you" and invited Griffith and Houston to the New Jersey studio where he worked at to listen to the song. Griffith recalled that there was a demo but Cope wanted to sing it live with her piano playing. In an interview with Billboard, Cope mentioned as she was finishing the song, "[Houston] picked up on the lyrics and was singing it along with me," to Cope's astonishment.
Afterwards, Griffith remarked "'that's the song – that's what I've been looking for.' It was the kind of tune that had the emotion that she could get into and sing her heart out." Houston immediately loved it and, according to Kashif, recorded the song immediately after Cope performed it, stunning Cope, Kashif and Griffith, who claims Houston recorded it in a single take.
The song included Bashiri Johnson on percussion, J. T. Lewis on drums, and Ira Siegel on rhythm guitar, Kashif himself programmed synthesized instruments including a bass marimba that opens the song, while Houston, Cope and Yogi Lee sang background vocals. According to the sheet music provided by Universal Music Publishing, "You Give Good Love" is an R&B song with the tempo of "moderately" under 76 beats per minute.
The song is known for shifting to higher keys throughout the verses, starting in the key of E major throughout the beginning and most of the first verse before moving up to G major for the first bridge, first chorus and the second verse, before then moving up to B♭ in the repeat of the bridge, which by then Houston, who had softly crooned the song up until that point, belted the song and would continue to do so throughout the song until the end. Houston's vocal range in the song spans from B3 to G5 while the instrumental range on Kashif's keyboard arrangement spans from C2 to B♭5
Release Arista released "You Give Good Love" as the official leading single from Houston's self-titled debut album on February 22, 1985, over a week after the album itself was released on Valentine's Day 1985. Despite having charted the previous year with soul singer Teddy Pendergrass on the adult contemporary ballad "Hold Me", which reached the top ten on both the R&B and adult contemporary charts, Houston was still relatively unknown at the time of the release of "You Give Good Love".
At the time, the music industry was under a "musical re-segregation" where songs by popular artists were split between top 40, R&B, AC and rock genre radio stations following the sociopolitical backlash of the disco era in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture, , (2001) p. 217: "In fact, by 1977, before punk rock spread, there was a 'disco sucks' movement sponsored by radio stations that attracted some suburban white youth, who thought that disco was escapist, synthetic, and overproduced." In the early '80s, music editors for the industry magazines Cashbox and Billboard changed their official R&B charts from "soul" to "black", with Billboard journalist Nelson George explaining in the latter publication's June 26, 1982 issue that year that the name change was based on the fact that "blacks have been making and buying pop music of greater stylistic variety than the soul sound since the early 1970s", noting most black artists were recording under various genres outside of what was considered "soul" music. By that period, very few black artists were given play on pop radio. At the same time, black artists who did eventually cross over to pop radio, such as Lionel Richie, Prince and Michael Jackson recorded music directly aimed at white audiences.
Black female artists had an even harder time to cross over to pop stations, with only Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan and Deniece Williams having intermittent success on top 40 radio. Arista had struggled with breaking new black female talent in the past with artists such as Phyllis Hyman and Angela Bofill, both of whom failed to score a top 40 hit and were reluctant to cross over, in fear of abandoning their predominantly black audiences.
According to CBC.ca, Clive Davis had a vision for Arista: he "wanted a pop star whose career he could steer, a singer who would be embraced by households around the world." In his 1974 memoir Clive: Inside the Record Business, Davis wrote: "an artist can be extremely gifted and yet remain unsuccessful if he or she records the wrong music, or gets an image that confuses potential audiences."
The release of "You Give Good Love" was designed to give Houston a noticeable position and standing within the R&B markets. Davis later explained the thinking behind releasing the song as the debut single from the album: "We wanted to establish her in the black marketplace first, otherwise you can fall between cracks, where Top 40 won't play you and R&B won't consider you their own. We felt that 'You Give Good Love' would be, at the very least, a major black hit, though we didn't think that it would cross over as strongly as it did. When it did cross over with such velocity that gave us great encouragement."
Chart performance
"You Give Good Love" entered the Billboard Hot Black Singles chart at number 89 on the March 9 issue, and on the ninth week of its release, reached the top ten of the chart, the issue dated May 4, 1985. Eventually, it hit the pole position of the chart, the issue date of May 25, 1985, replacing Kool & the Gang's "Fresh" off the top spot, and stayed atop for one week, becoming Houston's first R&B number-one single.
On the May 11, 1985 issue of Billboard, the song debuted simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Adult Contemporary charts at numbers 67 and 40 respectively.
Four weeks later, on the June 1st issue, the song gave Houston her first top 40 entry, rising to number 34. It gradually rose up the charts, becoming Houston's first top ten entry at number 7 for the week of July 6. On July 27, it reached its peak of number three on the chart, a position it would remain for three consecutive weeks afterwards, eventually spending a cumulative total of 21 weeks on the chart, including 12 weeks in the top 40 and six weeks in the top ten.
On the Adult Contemporary chart, it reached a peak of number four in the July 20, 1985 issue, becoming her second top ten entry and first solo top ten AC hit. It would spend 21 weeks on the chart. The song marked the first time Houston reached the top ten with the same song on three different main Billboard charts.
On the US Cashbox charts, the song repeated its Billboard success peaking at number one on the Cashbox Black Contemporary Singles chart for the week of June 1, 1985 and number three on the Top 100 Singles chart on August 3, 1985.
In Canada, the song debuted at number 95 on the RPM 100 Singles chart on the May 18 issue, and 15 weeks later peaked at number seven on the chart, the issue date of August 31, 1985, becoming Houston's first top ten hit in the country. It placed at number 76 on the RPM year-end Top 100 Singles chart of 1985.