In 1977, Philadelphia vocal trio First Choice dropped their fourth, highest-charting (at a modest #103) and arguably most revered full-length effort Delusions, which provided them with their last American pop chart entry, the catchy but slightly pedestrian disco number “Doctor Love.” Not nearly as successful as their 1973 proto-disco smash “Armed and Extremely Dangerous,” the single — which amounted more or less to a lyrical rewrite of Diana Ross’ 1976 hit “Love Hangover” — barely missed the US Top 40. Considering that a remix of the song hit the upper echelons of the dance charts in the late-1990s, it has not exactly been forgotten about. However, a semi-arcane and superior cut from the same full-length belatedly garnered quite a bit of unexpected club success, inspiring house music through being subject to countless reinventions. Let’s focus on some of the initial, more creative and less sterile reworkings of the song in question, “Let No Man Put Asunder.”
Inspired by the Biblical passage Matthew 19:6, “Let No Man Put Asunder” blended aspects of the ornate and sensuous Salsoul Records aesthetic — insistent mid-tempo grooves, lush synthesizers, polyrhythms and sultry vocals — with a lyric detailing incredulity over a husband’s impending departure. First Choice singer Rochelle Fleming defends her desire to stand by her man (“It’s not a perfect love, but I’ll defend it / ‘cause I believe that’s what God intended!”) and Annette Guest and Ursula Herring back her up by repeatedly protesting, “It’s not over between you and me!” Fleming spouts an assortment of pleas and promises: “I got to have you every day of my doggone life!/ […] Don’t leave me this way!/ […] Squeeze me tight, hold me right, all night!” She furthermore vamps, “I don’t wanna ever get married to anyone else but you, baby/ […] I’ll make your home a sweet paradise!” and makes additional concessions that (for many) could reek of such desperation that one might wonder why certain quarters misinterpret the song as an empowering anthem, or even more outlandishly, an empowering FEMINIST anthem. How does a pledge of devotion speciously truckling to a husband — penned by two MEN, no less — get misconstrued that badly? Such misguided reception to the song seems almost as infuriating as how women rallied around Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” without recognizing how unabashedly passive-aggressive and pouty it was. (And it was assumed to be over Dave Coulier, no less. Yeesh.)
So what if “Let No Man Put Asunder” is not empowering? Isn’t the wife in “Let No Man Put Asunder” just trying to be as sweet as treacle in order to maintain what she has, or did the authors actively intend to degrade her by describing her romantic fervor in a manner that could make her look overly clingy and desperate? The promises that songwriters Bruce Gray and Bruce Hawes make might be considered superficially attractive to some men, even despite having written the song in a post-Women’s Lib world where feather dusters are no longer a seemingly permanent fashion accessory. Maybe it’s what the writers themselves would really want to hear from a woman they plan to walk out on, or perhaps something more suspect could be at play underneath the song, like on some of the best Holland-Dozier-Holland cuts. (The adoration that amounts to unashamed obsession in “Bernadette” chiefly comes to mind.) However, there’s no telling line that hints at any contempt for the attempts at appeasement offered up by the spurned wife, nothing to reveal the true intent or real thoughts that could otherwise be obscured beneath the surface. Actually, it’s difficult to discern a deeper truth from “Let No Man Put Asunder” even in light of how the lyric vacillates between complete assuredness and insecurity, sometimes in the span of two lines. Is the wife really as certain as she claims to be that her husband will return? Is she trying to muster up resolve in order to be certain that her relationship means something or is she just being maudlin? Is she really that confident in astrology that her husband is hers to keep? Actually, how do we know that it’s her husband? She refers to her relationship as having been “joined by God,” so it’s implied that she’s married, right? Then why does she say, “I don’t wanna ever get married to anyone else but you, baby?” Doesn’t she mean to say, “I don’t wanna ever BE married to anyone else but you?” To say “get married” in that context makes her sound like she’s, well, unmarried! How scandalous is that? That’s a revelation worthy of The Real Housewives of New York! Who cares if it’s probably just a lyrical slip-up on Rochelle Fleming’s part? Even so, why should we care about that when we still have not covered how this song went on to influence a whole genre?
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In March 1979, Salsoul Records issued Disco Madness, the first remix full-length to be commissioned by a label. The record featured six tracks reworked by the most forward-thinking DJ of the disco era, the semi-legendary Walter Gibbons, who mostly remodeled his own 12-inch remixes of songs like Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” and Loleatta Holloway’s “Catch Me on the Rebound” in abstract fashions on the aforementioned release. He additionally dug up First Choice’s “Let No Man Put Asunder” for the collection and gave it quite a radical and nigh-on ethereal treatment; Gibbons coated the vocals in reverb, omitted the cymbals from the first two minutes of the song, and completely stripped the bass line from the song up until the final 45 seconds of the remix. What kind of whackjob strips the bass line from a disco song? But it works! The result sounds nearly spectral — it could almost pass for dub if the tempo were slower and, again, had more bass. Not that it needs it, obviously. (Besides, it nearly anticipates what happened with Wayne Smith’s “(Under Me) Sleng Teng.” If you can successfully strip the bass from a style of music as groove-oriented as disco, then why not from reggae?)
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In the early 1980s, DJ Frankie Knuckles started using the Walter Gibbons remix in his sets at the Chicago club The Warehouse, and it quickly became a club favorite among the dancers. Soon, the song came to epitomize the very essence of what was becoming known as “house music.” When the popularity of disco started to wane, Knuckles started to rework older songs, tinkering with tempos and blending in layers of drum machine percussion, until the demand for bootlegs of these live remixes likely prompted Salsoul to issue the 12-inch remix single of “Let No Man Put Asunder” in 1983. Frankie Knuckles’ extended remix brings up the buried elements in the song, like the barely audible ARP synthesizer chords underlining the background of the album version and the previously obscured saxophone in the chorus. Knuckles adds extra stomp to the drums by pushing them forward in the mix and aligning a heavily reverbed handclap to the snare. The Shep Pettibone remix from the same 12-inch takes the album version and makes it more spare and rhythm-oriented, infusing the song with stop-start rhythms, dubbed-out percussion, some re-recorded vocals in the monologue vamp, and lightly phasered cymbals that alternately bubble or seem to mimic a theremin.
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Since 1983, “Let No Man Put Asunder” has been reissued numerous times in official and unofficial capacities with updated remixes meant to appeal to the prevailing trends of the period, mostly subject to far dodgier house and hi-NRG mixes. The song has been sampled or appropriated on several occasions, most notably in Steve “Silk” Hurley’s 1987 UK chart-topper “Jack Your Body” (seen above). No less a figure than Mary J. Blige actually covered the song, her version appearing as the album closer to 1999’s Mary. However, the extended shelf-life brought about by such reverence for the song would have been unlikely if Walter Gibbons, Frankie Knuckles, and Shep Pettibone had not taken a shine to it. Otherwise, “Let No Man Put Asunder” would probably be undeservedly out-of-print right now, just like most disco and soul records from the same period, and the course of modern music would be drastically different for it.
