One Song - Dawn Penn's "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)"

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Wake the town and tell the people! This week, Diallo and LUXXURY explore the cultural conversation between the U.S. and Jamaica through the lens of Dawn Penn’s 1994 dancehall classic “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No). They trace the melody’s origins in blues music, follow its evolution into reggae, and highlight why out of so many versions, it’s Dawn Penn’s rendition that makes you wanna wine up. Say goodbye to sticky notes and calendar confusion with the Skylight Calendar. Go to SkylightCal.com/OneSong today for $30 off your 15 inch calendar. Songs Discussed: "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)" - Dawn Penn "Daughters of the Kaos" - Luscious Jackson "Freaks" - Vicious feat. Doug E. Fresh "Ring the Alarm" - Tenor Saw "Bam Bam" - Sister Nancy "Pose Off" - Red Fox feat. Screechy Dan "Simmer Down" - The Skatalites feat. Bob Marley and The Wailers "You Don't Love Me" - Willie Cobbs "She's Fine, She's Mine" - Bo Diddley "Fool For Love" - Prince Jazzbo "Concrete Jungle" - Big Youth "No, No, No" - K.C. White "For Health And Strength" - Triston Palmer "Fish Market" - Steely & Clevie "Wake The Town" - U-Roy "Girl I've Got a Date" - Alton Ellis "No No No" - Ghostface Killah "No, No, No" - Jae Millz "Yes, Yes, Yes (Jah Jah Loves Me)" - Dawn Penn "Cloud 909" - Lone One Song Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/40SIOpVROmrxTjOtH7Q1yw?si=2ddf2f1fcdd44d42 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Lexery, so I was thinking today's song is really unlike any other that we've ever done before. I could not agree more, Diallo. Today's song is the epic journey of one melody that has been interpolated, covered, remixed, versioned, and sampled for 70 years by everyone from Big Ute to Beyonce. And today's song is in our humble opinion. Yeah. The version. It is the one. The version.

When it was released in 1994, it was a global hit charting in the U.S., UK, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand. So weep it down and down the people about the musical podcast coming your way. Exactly. We're talking about one song. I think. That was genius. We're talking about one song and that song is, You Don't Love Me, No, No, No, by Don Penn.

No, no, no. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist luxury, aka the guy who whispers, Interpolation. And this is one song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres and tell you why they deserve one more listen.

You will hear these songs as you've never heard them before. And if you want to watch one song, you can watch this full episode on YouTube and Spotify. And while you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, luxury. You know, we mentioned up top that today's song is riddled with covers, interpolations, remixes, and samples. What was the first version of You Don't Love Me that you were exposed to? So the first time I ever heard the words, no, no, no with that iconic melody. Yeah. Those four notes. I mean, there's three notes and a half bend.

We'll talk about that on the episode. Was actually in an interpolated version by the band Lushes Jackson. Oh, man. They don't get mentioned enough. They're so great. There's grand royal EP debut in Search of Manning, which is so good. It has all these samples on it, including one of our favorite breaks that we hear multiple times across this show.

It's this song, which I'll play for you now, has not just the interpolation, but it's also got the drum break from Little Miss Lover by Jimmy Hendricks, which we just played recently on the Tribe Called Quest episode. What's that drum break? The song is called Daughters of the Chaos. That was the first time I ever heard the melody. And I pretty sure it haunted me for years without knowing the source,

which is one of the reasons why we love, as we'll be talking about, reuse of melodies and versioning and remixes, et cetera, because these ideas can live across songs. And then when you discover the source or sources, it's so gratifying to me. It's this connections across place and time. What year is this song?

This song came out in 92. So we'll get into it, but that song actually predates the version of Don Penn that we're going to be talking about. Absolutely. And who knows? Maybe it was in the air and Stealy and Cleavey heard it. Who the heck knows? We'll never know all these connections. What about you, Della?

Almost the first time you heard the melody or the song. Honestly, it's probably the version that we're talking about today because, you know, in the 90s, it was hard, you know, not to hear this song. Yeah. On the dance floor, because it was big. It was so big. Don Penn's 1994 version came at a time. time when dance hall was becoming huge. Yeah.

You know, we've talked before about like what regga tone was for the aughts, you know, the, the double O's, as we call them. Dance Hall was for the 90s. Like, it was the hot sound of the moment, permeating hip hop on both East and West Coast. Yeah. In the U.S. and in the UK, this song was part of that breakthrough. Yeah, yeah, I can totally see that. And I think that while the East and West Coast, like, 94 is like, this is when the feud

is really picking up, dance hall was like the one thing that was like everybody was going to agree on. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, some of my favorite songs in this period of the 90s and 90s hip hop culture are dance hall songs. You've got songs like Freaks by Louis Vichis. Ring the alarm. Ring the alarm by tenor song. And by the sound is dying. And by the way, a sister episode to this one.

You haven't listened already last year, we did an episode about Sister Nancy, Bomb-Bomb, which uses the Stalag-Lag-Seption or the Stagalag Rhythm, which is also in Tenor-Saws. Ring the alarm, yeah. Which thing got sampled by Fushnikins in their version of Ring the Alarm. And I also want to call out one forgotten banger from this period. Pum Pum Pshaws by Red Fots. No, because seriously, like, Pum Pum Pshaws is like one of those, you had to almost be there

to even know that it exists. But I feel like that medley gets used in a lot of ways now and people don't know where that medley is from. I'm just laughing at the slang. I mean, Pum Pum Pum Shards. Yeah. That's a big part of this, though, because Slack, which is what you call the sort of a subgenre, right? Slack where the lyrics are body on purpose.

The ribaldry of the language is a big part of this subgenre. We're getting ribald. We're getting ribaldry. A little Shakespearean. But like, yeah, dirty language, if you will, and the sort of overstating the case. But, like, that's a huge part of this subgenre. That's awesome. And I love that your starting point is at the intersection of dance hall and hip-hop, because that's such a part of the interplay between Jamaican America happens in the

song we're talking about today. They're cousins. They're like cousins that were born and they sort of We have blues that starts this. I don't want to give too much away. But this song's origin has a blues connection in America and then goes to Jamaica. We have in Jamaica in the 50s and 60s, toasting, which a lot of people would argue is a precursor to early hip-hop. Yeah. The like basically a microphone over two turntables. In the birth of hip-hop. That's right. MCs and DJs, part of the culture, sound system culture, finds its way through Cool Herk at some point to America, where it's very, very, very, very, you know, transformed radically, but we have an exchange, a musical, cultural exchange

happening. And then in the 90s, it goes back where we have hip-hop influencing Jamaica with dance hall, and that's a lot of what's happening here. So I love this back and forth over the years, and of course, this song traces an awful lot of that. No, I like what you're saying, because it is a musical conversation. Like, music goes from one

part of the diaspora to another part of the diaspora, and back and forth, it's almost like they're playing a game of, like, musical ping pong. And once it's really important, yeah, absolutely. I mean, like Jamaica pioneers so many forms of sort of like musical borrowing and sampling and the covers and the rhythms and the version. So like we're going to get into all the remixing and the interpolation that goes into a song like Don Pinn because as we said at the top of the

episode, it's been getting sort of passed back and forth for over 70 years. Exactly. Well, let's kickstart this musical journey. So I think we should start with Don Pins' 1967 version of You Don't Love Me. And the way Don Penn tells that one Sunday, she was hanging out at Studio One for their weekly auditions, which she got the chance to sing for legendary producer, Coxandad. He told her, hey, kid, I like your voice. Come back tomorrow. I sound just like Tommy Mattoll.

That's my Coxon, Dad. I don't do accents. She did come back the next day. And when she did, they recorded this song. Good to this day. So haunting. That's the only word I can think of for that melody. It's just haunting instantly.

Chris Isaac's Wicked Game. There's some songs that just have like a little bit of a mysterious haunted sound. Yeah, mysterious is a good word. It's mysterious and haunting. What era reggae is this? So in 1967, it's so interesting because reggae begins after rock steady, which comes after ska. And these are these trends that kind of come and go.

But before Roots, right? Well, right. So Roots Reggae is sometimes what the 70s era is called. And then it kind of goes into rockers, maybe, and then dance hall in the 80s into the 90s. But this is a really short period that's really two years, 66 to 68. And what's interesting about that is like SCA was 62 to 66 and then it just ends. Overnight, everyone in Jamaica just stopped making SCA because of the sound system culture,

because the DJs just ran the island basically. And if something was suddenly uncool, it was out overnight. So this rock steady version is right there in 67. It would have been the height of this very short-lived trend. But, I mean, one of the greatest musical trends of all time. I like that Jamaicans figured out, much like the rest of us, that, you know, Skaz, you can only listen to so much. It's true.

There's a limit. Let's not forget that it comes back. I didn't know Skada was from the 60s until, because, like, I grew up listening to Scott, the specials, you know? Yeah, you thought, I actually thought Scott was created in Orange County, California. I thought there's third wave, Scott. Like, I'm not going to talk about third wave, Scott. Second wave, Scott might be my favorite.

Yeah. And so the difference is really is that Skah is pretty fast. like on yeah and it's got this upbeat right which means that it's really too fast for you

to do the things that we later do in reggae which has have big amounts of space and the bass lines that kind of go everywhere rock steady was sort of a middle step

where it slowed down a little bit and we started to get the more intricate bass lines that are hooks that happens in the song for example

and then it sort of paves the way for the dub and the roots era that's so helpful because now we know that Scott was fast, reggae slow, but then rock steady

is sort of like this in between face. And there's always degrees. You have slower, Scott signs, but I've never really thought of them as like a sliding scale of tempo. Yeah, it's a bit of a sliding scale. That's super cool. Okay, so help me figure this one out because I read the Don Penn says she wrote the lyrics and was inspired by the church music that she grew up.

And I have this quote, Don Don Penn said, we used to sing this old gospel thing, yes, yes, yes, Jesus loves me. So, Instead, I sang no, no, no. Now, that's a really cool connection. But we do have to point out that her song sounds a lot like a song by the same name that was released in 1960. Let's listen to a little bit of You Don't Love Me by Willie Cops.

I love it. I love that, too. It's a little less haunting to my ear. That's a slightly less. It's a rock and blue song. And this goes towards what we were saying about the conversation because I think it's important to point out now that like nothing is created in a vacuum. No. Like, B.B. King and Chuck Berry, like, they didn't just invent the blues as we think about it.

They always throw a lot of love to Louis Jordan and the Symphony 5. In fact, I saw a video recently where you, Roy, who we commonly refer to as one of the pioneers of toasting. Right. You know, he said, in my eyes, Louis Jordan, it was the first rapper. To me, if there was a rapper, I think Livida Jordan was the first rapper. to me, you know? Yeah, if there was a rapper at the time because in my time I never know for a rap artist.

He was like, I was trying to do what he was trying to do on some of his early cuts. Like, ain't nobody in here but us chickens. Mixing up talking and singing and having instrumentals with, you know, a little bit of both on them. That goes back even further than toasting and rap. I agree. And it's such a rabbit hole you can walk down that's sort of the origins of rapping and chatting and toasting

because I actually saw a 20, 20 piece that they did back in 1981. This thing is such a time capsule. At one point, they show like these two really old black ladies on a porch. And they're doing this two camera. Went out on my front porch walking around. Stories in rhyme have traditionally been common among the black poor in the deep south. Face, a cone his head.

Next thing you want to do, slip in my bed. So you can see that there's something ancient, you know, in that clip that's going on here. And in fact, Willie Cobb says he got parts of. his song from interacting with field hands. That may be true. We don't know for sure, but we do know that there is an earlier recording that's pretty similar to Willie Cobbs' version. It's by Bo Diddley from 1955.

Let's listen to that now. This song is called She's Fine. She's Mine. I like it. But it should be said that they only use that title because the, you don't love me. He'd already had a song that was too similar to that. But you'll be hearing that in this. Yeah, so there's definitely a lot of similarities, including that second melody,

which is just like instrumental line. That is some pure uncut. That is some pure uncut. Blues. Is that where you were going to go with that? That's the blues. I don't know. Yes, we can call it the blues.

But I mean, to me, that is like, that is pure there. There is no, that's not the song you take the tin pan alley. You know what I mean? It's just like he definitely tapped into something pure there. Listen, I think part of what you're, to me, to my ear is part of what you're referring to two things. First of all, where does the song come from? Where does the melody come from?

Where does this idea come from? We may never know for sure because of as we're discussing, there is this long public domain tradition that precedes recording. Sure. So if there, there may have been a real field hand and maybe Bo Diddley also heard it from a different field hand. It could have just been in the tradition of blues for decades, maybe even 100 years by the time Bo Diddley recorded it. 100%. Could be. A hundred percent.

Could be that Willie Cobbs heard Bo Didley's version. So we have like the Bo Diddley version. Yes. We've got the Willie Cobbs version. We do have that. And then we have Don Pins. rock steady version. That's right. 1955, 1965, 1960,

1967. It's insane. And by the way, can I just say Don Penn's version just kind of in some ways just the most haunting. So it's important to know that Don Penn's early version was a hidden Jamaica, but it didn't really cross over here in the United States. And a few years later, Don Penn actually left the music industry and Jamaica to attend

some family matters. But as we're about to get into, her song continued to evolve as reggae and, you know, music from Jamaica continued to evolve. Let's hear a bit of Prince Jazzbo's Fool for Love. I love straight never

zone some silent one's drive. I love it. I think the difference between Louis Jordan essentially rapping while rapping over the song that his band is playing. Yeah. And this where he's essentially toasting over a

pre-existing record. Right. Listen, this is 1972. Hip hop begins cool, heck. You know, 1973, what happens in Jamaica prior to this moment is we have these events called sound systems, these places where music is played, DJs are playing records

to a large group of people outdoors. Outdoors, because you make them driving around your club. So these sound systems were big events where people listen to records. You had DJs. Of course, they were called selectors. Again, go back to our sister Nancy episode for a little more detail about

this. But in a nutshell, the selectors would play records and you would have DJs or emcees in our language, would toast over them. We would wrap over the records, basically talking about how great the party was and come back next week. And, you know, basic rhymes about like,

you know, you're wearing a cool hat. You're looking at all that. Like, I love these sort of early era wraps where it's pretty basic stuff. Totally. But it's exciting because it just is exciting to have these people doing it live over a record. It was a new innovation.

So the rhythm, we keep using this word, rhythm. What is the rhythm? Just really, in brief, a rhythm means the instrumental bed of a track, but sometimes it means the instrumental bed that has been manipulated remix. Early versions of remix is called dubs, which essentially mute certain instruments and maybe throw something else into a reverb or maybe it just gets rid of all the lyrics. Or I get sort of, exactly. So the vocal might be gone. You might have just drum and bass for a long time.

In these sound systems, drum and bass sounded amazing. To be clear, the drum and the bass, nobody had invented drum and bass. That's right. Not the genre yet. So we have versioning, which means you might get the original song. You might get a dub instrumental. You might get a dub with someone toasting on top of it. And you might hear all of them in a row. An interesting thing that starts to happen in sound system culture is a DJ. When something's popular, the feedback's instant.

And they'll do a rewind. You might hear the same track five or six times. You might hear it followed by a different song that has the same rhythm. You might hear just the instrumental and so when live might be toasting over it. All these variations are happening in real time in a live performance environment. and there's interplay between then what gets taken to the studio. Totally. And then someone might take that back from the studio and toast over that.

It's this back and forth, this exchange of recording and live and performance. And we have this wonderful legacy of ideas, rhythms, songs that are versioned in hundreds of ways, all of which are different, but have a shared origin. Even when I was DJing in the 90s, we would call them rhythms and you would get like a piece of vinyl. And there would be like 10 versions on. on one side, 10 versions on the other, and there would be the Beanie Man version, and the Bujubantan version. Exactly.

And the Super Cat version. And DJs might play a bunch of them in a row. But what was interesting is there was always like at some point, a sort of a crowd DJ consensus that, oh, these are the two versions that you have to play. That's awesome. Maybe Tennis Saw didn't come, he didn't show up this time. But like, you definitely had the vibes cartel,

you know, that one is the one you want to play. So bringing it back to Prince Jasbo, who we just heard, that was Prince Jasbo toasting over the Don Penn dub of the Don Penn original. So the multi-tracks were dubbed out. You hear little snippets of Don coming and going. So he's interacting with her. And that probably came out of a live performance, which they were like, the crowd probably went wild for. So they decided to go record it. So that happens. There's all these variations. That is toasting over the original. Sometimes the rhythm gets replayed by a different group of musicians. There's a whole side story that we won't get into about copyright not

existing in Jamaica until the 90s, which means that there's all this reuse is sort of enabled by no one really getting paid very much except the record labels. And here is a version of that. This is a re-record of no, no, no, just the instrumental. And it's big youth toasting. And this song is Concrete Jump. So those are different performers playing the same instrument. So those are different performers playing the same instrumental, the same music, essentially. But it's a different recording. This is a interpellation.

This is, gosh, I mean, would you I suppose it is. I suppose a rhythm. No, you're right. Just a record. These are, they're, it's a replay. You're right. Yeah.

And so far as that it's a replay. Correct. It's the entirety of the track. I've been listening over the years. You can't see. Okay, I'm glad to, as we sit here. Hours and hours and hours of listening to each other. Okay, so the rhythm was replayed by different musicians.

And what you just heard was just the drum and bass. So he's toast. toasting over a really stripped down dub of a re-recorded instrumental of the Don Penn song No No No, Right? So there's all these layers that are starting to accumulate. That's awesome. One more layer to that one is that the original version before it was dubbed to that drum and bass is a song called No, No, No, which is basically a cover by Casey White. No, no. So this is just a song that was released, and they stripped down the vocal.

That's so interesting. and that almost sounds like the Pat Boone version of No, No, No. It's like, I'm going to say, no, no, no. Listen, this is an important thing you're picking up on, which is what that third note is. So across all of the versions we've heard so far, we've heard a lot of different ways of getting that third no or that third ah in the Cobbs and Diddley versions.

And here's the thing that's so interesting about it, is that what it is is it's a blue note. And some singers are singing it and some aren't. And that blue note means you're kind of no, no, no. How much are you bending it? Yeah. That's where you get the hauntingness. That's where you get the hauntingness.

And Don Penn, to me, to my ear, bends it the most. She goes all the way to an entire half step. No, no, no. It's so subtle. But some of the other versions, it doesn't show up. They don't really do it. It doesn't show up in some of the versions, but it does in some of the other ones. But I feel like the closer you get to that original, like, Bo Diddley version, like that hauntedness.

That's what I meant by, like, there's some raw. pure something there. But what's interesting is he doesn't really have it in his version either. It shows up along the way somewhere. I hear it's showing up in the guitar solo on the Willie Cobb song. It may be lost to history.

Which version of this song and this idea of a song is where that like half step down that Don Penn like nails and it to me becomes the canonical way to make the melody happen. Because it is the most haunting version. No. Yeah, no, seriously. It makes the song.

The imagery that comes into my head is, you know, those children's books with like a body, and you can change the person's hat, or you can change their shoes, or you can change their clothes. That's kind of how this is. So another mix and match option is it's a re-record of the original track, but it's a new song on top, but it has the same melody. So here's Tristan Palmer for health and strength. You'll recognize the track. You'll recognize the melody.

But it's just new lyrics, new song. Yeah, no. So we've been talking about this conversation between the United States. States and Jamaica and how how music goes from one place and they get sent back over the water in a different form. Right. And we've talked on this episode and others about the importance of people like, you know, Cool Herk in the year in 1973.

I think it's actually important to point out that Africa and Bombata is sort of the person who really started putting Cool Herk's name out there as like that person. We can talk about that. But we can also talk about some of the people who don't always get mentioned. And I'm talking about unsung heroes. I'm talking about Steely and Cleavey, specifically. You know, they had been around before the dance hall era, playing in bands in the 70s, but in the 1980s, they came together as producers and they really took dance hall

by storm. You may not know them by name, but they worked with everyone. I'm telling everyone from Shabarang's to Gregory Isaacs to Billy Ocean and Gwen Stefani. They also created the beat that allegedly the genre of regga tone is based off of. With this instrumental track, Fish market from 1989. And to be clear, like the reggae, this is a current ongoing lawsuit where Steeley and Clevee are suing all of reggaeton. Literally anybody's murder. It's a 180, like, plaint, or, oh, man, defendant.

I can't wait to see that settlement. It's crazy. They're not going to win, but they claim, here's what they claim to own. They claim to own, don't, kepum. That's it. Don't get them, da, um, da, um, they claim that prior to the song we just heard didn't exist. Now, that's not true. but that is literally in the court system right now,

and they're basically making a claim that reggaeton comes from dance hall, specifically their dance hall, which, by the way, there is something to be sad about making a claim to the connection. I think there's some validity there. As a person who was there when regitone blew up,

everybody can hear the relationship between the dance hall of the mid and late 90s and what admittedly blew up as its own genre come the 2000s. I think that much is pretty clear. And you wanted to say something about the track being a digital rhythm, am I correct?

Listen, this is not the episode where we're going to go down the path of all things digital rhythms. We will definitely have a slang tang episode for all of you, Cassio MT40 fans out there. Great stories behind that. What is important to set up, though, is that Sili and Clevee were part of this new generation

of producers who realize that you can do everything you need to do musically from the digital machines, the synths and drum machines of the 80s. And it was the end of the roots era comes for a lot of musicians who are out of work as a result of these digital rhythm. So there's a great clip of Steeley and Cleavey in the studio with their Oberheim DX and their synthesizers.

Let's watch a little bit of how they transformed reggae in the 1980s. I'm going to program the rhythm for Dock, which is a popular Jamaican rhythm. I feel like a similar thing happened in the United States with the drum machine and how a whole generation of black bands just went away. Musicianship changed dramatically when you didn't need musicians quite so much. So let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to hear how all. All of this shared musical history between America and Jamaica coalesced to create the iconic 1994 version of You Don't Love Me that we all came to know and love.

And we'll also find out definitively what Euroy says at the very top of the thing. I know that I've been saying something wrong this whole time. We're going to correct it. Stay tuned. Say goodbye to sticky notes and calendar confusion with Skylight. The Skylight calendar is here to help keep your family organized. This beautifully designed digital display sinks with your existing calendars, making it effortless to track events, appointments, and reminders in one easy-to-see place.

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The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence. And accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move. Welcome back to One Song, Luxury. Today we're talking about Don Pins. You don't love me. No, no, no. That's the one. And there's some unsung heroes that we want to give special attention to. These are the producers that Don Penn gets linked up with.

Steely and Cleveevy. What can you tell us about Steely and Cleevy? Steely and Cleevy, some of the biggest Jamaican producers of all time, not just suing reggaeton, but also in their own right, they had so many hits on the charts in the 80s and 90s. They were just absolutely dominated the island's sound systems and music culture. So Wycleft Steely Johnson is the keyboard player, and Cleveland Cleevy Brown is the drummer.

But of course, when they get into the digital era, they start doing a little bit of everything on the machine. Sure. But they get their start in 1974 when Augustus Pablo, again, Sister Nancy episode, we talk about Mr. Augustus Pablo. They're 11 and 14 years old, respectively, when he invites them to play on the album, Africa Must Be Free by 1983, Humandale. Seminal record in the dub and Renreg. The number of people get their start like at the age 8, 9, 11, and 12. I'm starting to think that like all of us were doomed to be nobody's.

And all the great was were just coming out early. It's too late. It's too late for greatness. But yeah, in the 70s, they are in studios nonstop. They end up being in the studio one and Roots Ratt expands, respectively. They're living, breathing, and eating music and studio. So when their moment happens in the mid-80s, they're ready. That's where the domination comes from.

They put in their 10,000 hours and then some. And by the mid-90s, they end up in a studio with Don Pinn. Now, tell us about Don Pinn's return to music. That's right. Well, eventually she moved back to Jamaica. She starts doing music again, and there's a few different versions of the story. But in the interview with Cleveevy, he says, that in 1992, she showed up at their studio trying to sell a tape.

In other words, a song. She's trying to get back into the music industry. And Celian Clevee, it should be said, we're huge fans of not just her, but specifically that song. So Clevee says, quote, it was like telling a child that Santa Claus was outside. We told her we'd love to re-record, you don't love me. It hunted them, too, from their youth as well.

Oh, that's super cool. I hear there's also a deeper reason Cleveevey had for wanting to re-record the song. And I found this quote. Clevey said, quote, I find a problem in Jamaica with archiving. Many of the great songs weren't preserved. So we make an effort to re-record them and present them to a new generation. We really believe that we should make the music available and history be kept alive. Yeah, that is so core to the Jamaican tradition through everything we've just been talking about with the versioning and everything. It's preserving and keeping ideas alive and not thinking, well, we did that already exactly like this. So no aspect of it can ever be touched again.

No, a great song is forever. A great melody, a great haunting melody is forever. And it should be preserved. So without further ado, let's get into these stems. Let's start listening to the stems where the song actually begins. And by the way, as a huge fan of this song, I don't think I ever knew quite what Euroy was saying. But let it go forth from the one song, Mountain Top.

What he says is, wake the town and tell the people about the musical disc coming your way and tell us more about that sample and I can't wait to hear it in the stems. Listen, not only did Celian Clevee want to preserve this song and give it back to the original singer of the song by making this re-record. They also wanted to include some of Jamaican history in it.

So it starts right off the bat. We've got a toaster kind of harketing back to the day where a toaster might be toasting over it. And it's Uroy, yeah. And it's specifically a sample. So now they're bringing some hip-hop aspects into Dan Sol by sampling. This is a new thing.

Previously, there's rhythms and re-referral. But they weren't using fragments quite so much. They weren't using loops like it hit on. Wake the Town and Tell the People is from a song called Wake the Town from 1970. So this is a 1970 recording that would have probably come the day after a big successful toasting live where U.Roy was toasting over this song, Girl I've Got a Date, Alton Ellis, 1966, a huge hit. It's classic rock steady. Look, another thing they talk about preserving history. Remember how I pointed out that rock study existed for only two years. And toasting was sort of of an era to this sort of early toasting. There's something really cool about Sili and Clevee wanting to bring back these Jamaican recording traditions that happened and then ended. So this was a long time ago and somebody in

1994 may not have been aware of this history. That's very true. Listeners may not have ever known the legacy of these different moments in time in Jamaican music history. And I mean like, you know, besides the fact that it just really is a super strong way to bring in this song. That too. This is like sort of peak 90s hip hop sampling era. So on a lot of hip hop songs, you've got, you know, songs starting off with a James Brown sample, you know,

bringing in on the rhythm. They're also just like speeches by like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that are getting sampled, that, you know, especially in the post-public enemy era, that, you know, you're bringing in that bit of black history into hip-hop. So it's a way of linking,

it's lineage. Stuff from decades earlier to the music of the time. Which is core. Another connection between dance hall and hip-hop is just, the foundational reuse of existing content as a connection to the past. The drums are always so important when we're talking about hip hop or dance also. What's going on in the drums? I can't wait to hear some of this. So I'm not absolutely positive what drum machine this is, but from the footage we saw,

we know that sealing cleavey used in Oberheim DX. I think this kind of sounds like it to my ears, but I also know that they, not unlike Jimmy Jam, go back to our Jimmy Jam episode, they changed the chips a lot. They would find their own sounds. They were very dialed in technologically. So they could manipulate sound. So this drum machine that you're about to hear, this is the digital era, we're 10 years into it.

But it's also mixed with some looping samples of the, whoa, whoa, from the Wake the Town and Tell the People from the Ui sample. So between the two of them, they create this interesting mix of drum machine and sample percussion. And sampled voice used as percussion. Exactly. And that's just the who-whoop, whoa, whoa, from Wake the Town. And it should be pointed out, too, that with all of Jamaica's innovation

with recording reuse, with the entirety of the rhythm and multi-tracks for dubs and stuff, one thing they didn't really do was what hip-hop did, which was the use of breaks as loops. That's a really big sort of difference in terms of innovation.

So now they're bringing in that hip-hop innovation of a four-bar or whatever it is loop. In this case, it's not even a beat. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like 16th notes. And as a fan of the song, talking about using his voice, Heuroy's voice as like a sample.

Like they keep coming back, do the people. Yeah, yeah. The people. The people. The call and response between 1994 and 1970. Yeah. So history lesson in the song.

Love it. So then there is the digital base, which is one of the biggest innovations. The drums, the digital drums and the digital base. I'm glad we're talking about this. Two main things that change. But arguably with the drums, you get this very clean sound that's consistent. And with the bass, you just get a massive consistent sound. Listen, if you haven't already, go listen to Don Penn's song on some good speakers or like an

a loud car or something, and you will hear that speaker getting its workout. Speaking of which... I hope that speaker hydrated because it is a workout. That thing is going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, boom. Let's dive into that. Exactly right. I believe this is a Yamaha CS1 and prepare your ears for some big Jamaican bass. Now bring in some drums.

I wish you guys could see the people in the audience. Everybody's like... And one thing to my ears I'm just noticing is the drums are doing a swing. dun to dat to dot to dot to dot to there's a little bit of a skip more of a swing than straight but that bass line is don't don't don't don't it's like a straight 16th notes ding ding ding ding ding ding ding so there's an interesting rhythmic interplay between dun dun dun dun and and da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da it's it's weird because it's almost like even though it's technically base it's kind of functioning like a tuba it's almost like there's like a tuba there's like

because it's like expanding it's expanding I don't know how to even describe it but like it's part of what makes the song sound so good. It's very body. It's very bodily. Like you feel it in your gut. 100%. And that's a big part of the Jamaican legacy is they pioneered building sound systems for outdoors, meaning they pioneered making bass sound good because it's hard.

You need a lot of power and energy and big-sized speakers. They dialed it in in the 70s, and by the time they got to this, they knew how to make bass move your body. Absolutely. Let's get into some other instruments. We've got some guitar. We've got some piano. What can we hear from that?

So the rhythm track has guitar and piano basically doing the skank, doing the off-bait chord. And I believe that's Steeley playing it live. He may have played some of it and looped some of it in that video, which is so instructive. Because you can see they're performing on the drum machine, not using it as a sequence thing where you program it and let it go. They're actually playing the beat in real time. They may have been doing that just to show how the beat was constructed. It's unclear. But what you find out from that video is how talented they are at both programming and playing live.

knows what's what in the song. I mean, like you said, they were playing in bands before. So it wouldn't surprise me if they're going, not that he invented this, but I always think back to our episode about Jay Dillo where he was like, I'm not going to like use loops in that way. I'm going to still have the performance element. Yeah, exactly right. So let's listen to the rhythm track. I had to say the duh. I like it. The rhythm track. I'm code switching in one sentence. And I'll bring in the drums and bass for context so you know that we're on the offbeat. So we're versioning right now here in the One Song Studios. By the way, one thing I need to point out, this is basically a blues song chord-wise.

It's the 4-1 and then the 5, back to the 4. 1-4-5, that's blues. But oftentimes the blues is like 12-bar blues is your consistent, you know, famous structure. That if you sit down with a bunch of musicians and you don't know what else to play, like, you can play a 12-bar blues with strangers. And like everyone will know what to do. They'll know when to move to the next thing. But with this one, it's sort of a strange count.

Whenever I try to count, like, when to make the change, it might be like a 13-bar blues. I'm not really sure. It kind of changes from verse to verse. And that's relevant because in the original version, they are playing 12 songs a day, these instrument players in Studio One. They don't have time to go back and correct things. And you'll hear a number of times there are mistakes in the original one

where the bass player was like, oh, damn, we moved on to the next chord. John Penn talks about that in some interviews. So it's like the song, we didn't have time, but it was still a hit in spite of having these little flubs in them. Okay, we come to literally one of my favorite parts of the whole song. And it's not there the entire time. It's the trumpet. It's the horn.

Yeah, this melody is so great. It's so good. And we had to do a little bit of research to find out who's playing the horn because we didn't know. I mean, just to back up a second, this entire song, the album that came out on has instrument credits on every song except for this one, which just has programmed and arranged by Cia, and Cleavey. So we presume that it's Sealy and Cleevy playing all the parts, except for this one. Except for this one. Why don't we hear the horns from Don Pins, you don't love me?

It's so good. It's slightly different from the original I just noticed, too, by the way. It doesn't bend the same way. The original goes, it's like it is a blue note. The original one has more of a blue note instead of dun, dun, it goes, it's a little subtle distinction. It's a little differences. We did some research to find out who actually is playing the horn on this. We found this quote from Cleavey. It reads, Steely's keyboard created a smooth, deep bass like the old sound system recordings. We couldn't find the trumpeter from the

original record. So David Madden, who was Bob Marley's trumpeter, did a great job. So there's a straight up Bob Marley connection to Don Pins. You don't love me. That's really cool. That's so cool. And by the way, that part is so iconic that I remember in the

Ghost Face Killet version of this song, he actually uses that part as sort of his chorus. Oh, really? Absolutely. We can check that out right here. All right. Well, now we come to the part that I'm sure everybody's been waiting for. Don Penn, her vocals, the stems. Sweet, sweet honey, but haunting honey.

It's haunted honey. It's haunted honey. Let's trademark that. Let's hear some, no, no, no, you don't love me. No, no, no. You don't love it. Hunting. And also, it's the subject matter of the lyrics, right?

Because she's saying, you don't love me. So it's dealing in some darkness. And so the haunting sounds appropriate. Part of what makes this melody so powerful is she's singing basically two blue notes that are stacked on top of each other. So it's no, no, that's the first one. That's a minor third. And the other one on top of that is another minor third. No, no, no.

Which gets to a tritone, which you'll remember from our Lady Gaga episode. It's halfway up the scale. It's the evil interval. Metallica uses it all the time. It sounds dissonant, and then it gets resolved right away. No, no, no.

And it's so deeply satisfying when it just goes that half step down. But in that moment that it's up there, minor third, minor third. It's this tritone interval and it's so tense. Yeah. It just wants to resolve.

You could hear the tension in the relationship. So much tension. Absolutely. You would be like, I love you. You'd be like, do we have issues in this relationship? You just please end the uh. You just get there. Please get there.

By sliding back down that little half step, that makes it a little bit. Yeah. But to be clear, it's a delicious because it's musical sort of tension. It's a longingness. It's blues. It is the blues. That's why it's called a blues note. Because it really contains a lot of the history of this music.

It's really powerful stuff. It's one thing that connects all the songs we've been listening to is this blue note. It's not in the European tradition. And you know, it's also, there's that tension in the lyrics because she goes into, I'll do anything you say, boy. Can we hear a little bit of that, you know, by itself? I'll do anything you say, boy. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a healthy relationship.

I don't think she should do that. Hey, I'll do anything you say. I think that's a bad idea. That seems pretty bad. And then there comes this other line, which is, let's just say, pregnant with innuendo. If you ask me, can we hear that line? Right. So in the blues format, as I've been saying, now we're at the five. Yeah.

We're at the dominant chord, which means that we feel like we are needing to resolve. Yeah. And she's saying, Because if you ask me. Another blue note. Baby. I'll get my. Yeah, that baby is,

that is, those are the blues, blue notes you can hear. That's some bluesy blues. What I'll say is that as a DJ, when I would play this song, it wasn't like it cleared the dance floor. It had everybody go off into their own dark corner and think about where their relationships weren't functioning,

quite the opposite between the music and her voice sounding so good. And the drums underneath it, it's actually one of those songs that people felt, like really close the night out on a positive tip. Like it's actually like one of those few songs. It's a legitimate slow dance in my lifetime. Oh yeah. Like we don't have like Stardust by Artie Shaw to like everybody grab your honey

and then slow dance with. But put on Don Penn song and you'll have a whole room of people who were literally going for it a second ago. They'll all kind of like partner up a little bit or at least like look for somebody they want to grind with or slow dance with or wine in the dance with. It's so interesting. hearing you say that with your DJ experience with this song at the time,

is, right? Yeah. So because it's 81 BPM, roughly, it means you're probably being able to mix it with hip hop barely decently every now then, right? Sister Nancy's Bomb-Bomb. You know, a lot of that hip-hop that's in like the 75-77 period, just like ease up on the, on the fade

and then all of a sudden it's in that 81 pocket. Yeah, that's so cool. I love that connection. I just think that it's funny that a song that sounds so dark from a lyrical point of view can inspire so much love and attention on the dance floor from a crowd. Yeah, it's a sexy song. I feel like it really involves all the elements of romance from the beginning to the end of it in three

minutes. It accomplishes what Mad Cobra's Flex did, but Mad Cobra Flex is really just like, I want to slow dance with you. This one is talking about a questionable relationship, and yet it still inspires goodwill and feelings from those who hear it. So after going on this long and epic journey and hearing how much Don Pins vocals add to this melody. I got to know how do these splits shake out? I wish there was a simple answer, but this is the most complicated songwriting splits ever made in the history of the world. Really? Yeah, it's in conflict

so many different ways since Sunday. The answer is that currently right now, the songwriting money is all held in escrow because no one can agree on who owns what. Yeah. Nobody's making money. Money is being transferred to an account, but nobody's spending it. Behind the scenes, there are multiple claims for ownership, the numbers don't add up, and no one sat down in a room with everyone to say, how do we figure this out? So in the meantime, it's just kind of in limbo. At the time the recordings came out, she was credited as either a co-writer as a soul writer. But at a certain point, claims were made by the Willie Cobbs publishers. And Willie Cobbs, in turn, had had claims on his song made by Bo Didley's publishers. So Willie Cobbs's song is already 80-20 between his estate and

Bo Didley's estate. And both of those estates are in conversation as we speak, you know, with everyone from Studio 1 to Steeley and Cleeby from all these people are figuring it out. And in the meantime, unfortunately, nobody is getting paid. I gotcha. Well, that's the publishing split. That's on the publishing side. Now, with that said, does Don Penn make any money maybe on the master's side? It's quite possible. When people do covers and sample a song? It's very possible. Well, on a cover, it would be the publishing money that anyone would be getting anyway. sample her voice. If they sample her voice, in theory, she would be paid. If she, depending on her deal,

the short answer is, I don't know the answer to your question. I do think she used to make money from this song. Hopefully it was enough to sustain her in this limbo period. Performances, if she's playing live, she's making money from fees from playing live. Yeah, I was going to say, even back in the in the Jamaican era before, like the copyrights were really protected, the artist could still make money off of the live performance. And I hope that's right. And that's still the case. And just one last thing, not to add more complexity, but this is also a region-to-region thing. Sure. So there may be regions where she is being paid and other reasons where she's not.

It's a big mess behind the scenes. Hey, I'll tell you what, if Don Penn is coming to your region, go see her. Yeah. And pay the actual, you know, ticket price. Seeing her live is the most definite way to make sure she gets paid. I like that. Well, I think we can say for sure that Don Penn's version has definitely lived on. It's survived many, many decades and many, you know, social movements.

and there I say, it's still the canonical version. It feels like the canonical version to me too. Definitely the canonical version. But it's been sampled, it's been covered, it's been remixed. Let's dive into that. One of the most well-known versions in recent years was Beyonce's cover and her rendition of the song when she performed at Coachella is the Homecoming performance. And epic, I think right up there with Daapunk and the Pyramid performance, Beyonce's

homecoming. Let's play a clip of her version of, you know, love me. I love the people. The people. They're interpolating the U-Roy sample. They are re-s singing a sample of a man's singing. Right. Which comes from the

recording of the song that she's covering. Yes. Which was a re-recording of a song that the same singer had sung 27 years earlier. 100%. But can I also point out another thing, which is that we talked a little bit about this when we talked about when Beyonce covered Dolly. There's just something about the way when Beyonce sings, you don't love me.

She doesn't feel like she's actually giving that dude a lot of power. It almost feels like she's like, dude, I'm on to you. You don't love me. This I know now. Like there's just something about the way that she sings it. That's great. It does give a little bit more power back to the female singer of the song. That's perfectly put. That is so Beyonce. You're right. It is, it does seem like the Jolene cover. And it's the same lyric. She's not really tweaking them at all, but just the delivery is what I think is coming. It's the delivery. It's what makes that impression. And it's the way that she's staring into that camera. It's almost like, that dude is dude. Yeah. It's like the opposite of what I'm saying.

singing is what I mean. I mentioned earlier that I love the ghost face killer version of the song. I implore you guys to go back and listen to the whole song because one thing that he does that I don't think it's been done quite since Prince Jasbo earlier is that he doesn't take any of the lyrics out. Like he's not singing over the dub, the instrumental, an interoperable. No, he's literally just rapping over the song. You can hear her sing every single note and he's just rapping over it.

So in that sense, Ghostface Killer has gone back to a purely almost Jamaican. in a tradition of chatting over the 50s count Machuki when it begins. Yeah, that's what they would have been doing. But I also want to point out one other hip hop use of this song. Jay Mills came out with the song, his version of No, No, no, no.

And he did something in it that I love it when hip hop does this. Let's play a clip. My trainees and West Indies in the cut, get up. Lick off a shot if you're bumping with Jay Mills and if the bouncer be like chill, tell them. I love it when hip-hop. samples like something pretty or ballady.

But then when they drop it into the verse, it means something totally different. Because he's like, it security tells you to chill. Tell him, no, no, no. Like, I love that. Yeah, the call and response. That's that humor.

You know. That's awesome. I love that. And that's a loop of the of the 1994 stealing and cleavey version with some added 808s layered in there. To make it more friendly to 2003 when that song came out. And you just reminded me of a question that I was not able to answer. I do not know the origin.

of the bow, Bo, Bo, Bo, Bo, Bo. Like, question to the One Song Nation is like, where did the Bo come from in the Don Penn version? I did not know we were going down the bow. But yes, if you know the origin of Bo, please, please.

They're all played Bo. If you know the origin of Bo, let us know. Do you know the origin of this bow? Sure. Question mark, key S. For the record, that was definitely not the first. I think Yellow Man in the 80s was doing like the gun sounds.

So it's like maybe a call back to the gun, the boop, pew, pew, pew, pew, just, you know, to this day, when I got on the boot to record my song for Sherman Showcase, I definitely made like, you know,

like everybody kind of, you know, gun used as a percussive onomatopoeia maybe as old as wap babalubap, wap bamboo. Totally, yeah, the origin of that we may never know, but the voice on this sample,

maybe someone does know that. Let us know if you. Maybe we know that. Luxury, do you have a favorite interpillation cover or what have you of no, No, no, no. Listen, there are so many incredible versions of this song. We went through the 70s versions of the original. This version has also been versioned and remade and remixed so many times. I will make sure that they're all in our Spotify playlist. Go to Spotify right now and type in

one song playlist. And you'll see for this episode, there'll be 30 or 40 different covers. You know, one of my favorites, interestingly sort of ties it all together with that origin story that Don Penn tells about the church song. Yes, Jesus loves me. origin story for her No, No, No. Okay. She recorded in 2011 a version of the song called Yes, Yes, Yes. Jaja loves me. Oh, I love it.

So she's using her melody from No, No, No, new musical bed. And it's sort of like an answer song to herself. I think that's great. Like, I would play that now because we all know so many of these other versions. This would be the one to be like, this is a new context for this song, right? This is a new interpulation. It is an interpolation, my friend. Absolutely right.

I love that. I would say that is a very cool song. I love it whenever it turns into a spiritual song for the artist, especially given the importance of this song in her life. Yes. This is her, giving thanks to maybe its presence. The soundtrack of her life. Absolutely. With all of these versions, what would you say is the legacy of Don Penn's 1994 version? I love that 30 plus years later. It's a song that still gets its hooks into you. It's that melody is so timeless. And the recording and her voice and everything about it just came together so perfectly. It is amazing to think that we, you know, the song we're talking about today is 30 years old. The song that sort of gave birth to it was 30 years before that.

That's right. It's insane that we've gone pretty much almost 70 years in having the song in our lives. And look, I think that the song will continue to live on. It's a song that unlike a lot of great songs from the 90s, You can still play it today. It still connects with crowds of almost any age. And it's just beautiful. Like you said, haunting, but definitely beautiful. Hunting, honey. Or honey hunting, whatever I said.

Haunted honey. I think that this is a song that will be around for at least another 30 years, if not more. And just zooming out a little more, too, I love that we get to tell the story with all of these versions and the 50-whatever songs we've been playing today about how a single idea can have so many different interpolations and remixes and rhythms and versions

and each of them be different and transformed and their own unique three-minute story. If you think about it in that way, this is a melody that had its origins, perhaps in the 1800s, made its way through American Blues to another shore, and through Rocksteady, made it back, and made it back and sort of dominated,

you know, the music world 100 years later and continues to 30 years after that. So if anything, this is a fun way to chart the evolution of music. By the way, there's also this, quote from Steeley that I think sums up their intentions and by effect the impact of this song. Steeley said the younger generation will always move so fast

that you lose what was there before. At times we want to go back and make things that were there into modern times. Just remind them of what they had before. Otherwise, you can keep evolving and evolving until you've lost everything. That's a great

quote. I love that. Freaking great quote. I just, thank you, Steeley. Thanks for writing that. Okay, luxury. It's time for one more song. It's the segment where we share a deep cut or a hidden gym with you, the one song nation, who we love and with each other. Lecture, you want to go first? Sure. Well, listen, I just couldn't help myself. There's so many great versions of this song. This is one that we didn't get a chance to play in the episode. Let's listen to this incredible jungle remix, which is Don Penn's vocals and a completely new underbelly, which is, I think, just going double time because, right,

jungle is essentially 160-ish or 170 BPM. Sure. That's Don Penn and Bounty Killer. That's actually an earlier re-recording that they didn't use the final take from. But that is her singing it. There's some harmonies that didn't get used. And it's the song, it's the same tempo, but just double-time drums.

And it's like, we're raving now. We're juggling. We're drum and basing. I love that. What about you, Diyala? What's your one more song? My one more song, this week, comes from an artist who, I've appreciated it for a long time,

sort of an electronic music artist, name Lone, L-O-N-E. And I always come back to this because this always sounds so wonderfully cool. This song is called Cloud 909, and it's by Lone. You know, some songs just come in

and they just take you by the throat. And Cloud 909, which features some good 909 action, I'm really a big fan of that. That's so cool. That's from this era where you can sample one chord from another record,

and then pitch it up and down and get these like crazy, like not found in nature scales, basically. But it sounds amazing. That's one of the things I love about sampling is like the mistakes that sampling and DJs with like a musician wouldn't have necessarily written something that sounds like that. Sure. I also think it's on some future episode we'll talk about there's this documentary going around now about Craftworks effect on the city of Detroit and the dance music there.

Another interchange. And I think another interchange. And I think that at some point we will we will tackle Detroit techno. Oh, hell yeah. As always, if you have an idea for one more song, you can find us on Instagram. and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at Diallo, D-I-A-A-L-O, and on TikTok, Diallo-R-R-D. And you can find me on Instagram at L-U-X-X-U-N-N-U-S-U-Y on TikTok at Lecture-X. And now OneSong officially has its own Instagram and TikTok. Go follow at One-Song podcast for

exclusive content. You can also watch full episodes of One Song on YouTube and Spotify. Just search for One-Song podcast. We'd love it if you'd like and subscribe. Also be sure to check out the One-Song Spotify playlist for all of the songs we discuss in our episodes. You can find the link in our episode description. And if you've made it this far, we think that means you like the podcast. So please, don't forget to give us five stars, leave a review, and share with someone you think would like the show. It really helps us keep this thing going. All right, luxury, help us in this thing. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist luxury. And I'm at the writer-director and

sometimes DJ Diallo Riddell. And this is one song. We'll see you next time. This episode is produced by Melissa Duanyas. Our video editor is Casey Sondon. Our associate producer is Jeremy Bimbo, mixing by Michael Hardman and engineering by Eric Hicks. Production supervision by Razak Boykin. Additional production support from Z. Taylor. The show is executive produced by Kevin Hart, Mike Stein, Brian Smiley, Eric Eddings, Eric Wahl, and Leslie Guam.