“Mary told me that she had been having similar thoughts, ideas that reflected her life and her career,” Davis recalls. “She had traveled around the globe, as an activist and as an ambassador and appeared to have a social conscience,” says Davis, referring to Wilson’s lobbying for “Truth in Music” legislation, prohibiting the usage of an act’s names without an original member taking part (or legally licensing the name) Wilson was also appointed by Secretary of State Colin Powell as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Each man wanted to write something with “social import,” collaborated over the phone, and thought of Wilson as the perfect voice for it. “Why Can’t We All Get Along,” came about, according to Davis, as part of a 2006 conversation he was having with fellow Detroit songwriter Angelo Bond, who had also worked for Motown.
Released in 1976, the album featured Wilson along with Scherrie Payne and Susaye Greene.
Wilson and the song’s cowriter, Richard Davis, met during his time with Holland-Dozier-Holland’s production company in Los Angeles when Brian and Edward Holland produced “Mary, Scherrie & Susaye,” the final studio album by the Supremes. “She was adamant that ‘Why Can’t We All Get Along’ be her anthem,” stated Wilson publicist Jay D. This digital debut puts together, for the first time, all of the tracks produced by Hal Davis for her eponymous 1970 solo album, with the four songs produced by Dudgeon that were given to her as a settlement for being dropped by Motown in 1980, as well as “Why Can’t We All Get Along.” That song, penned in 2005 by Motown staffers Angelo Bond and Richard Davis (who co-produced the track) and recorded on Motor City turf at the Recording Institute of Detroit, came with a dual message – one directed toward her old friend, Diana Ross, when a proposed reunion of The Supremes in 2000 fell apart during negotiations (Ross’s Return to Love tour went forward sans Wilson, but with former, latter-day Supremes), as well as a plea social justice between Black and White America. Sadly, she did not live to see the release of “Mary Wilson: Expanded Edition,” which dropped on Friday. Wilson even recorded a YouTube video at the start of Black History Month with the exclamation “At last.” These were the conversations that she had with Bruce Resnikoff, President/CEO of Universal Music Enterprises, and daughter Turkessa Babich, the CEO of Wilson’s music company and the keeper of her mother’s flame. When her next album, “Walk the Line,” came out in 1992, her then-label CEO Records went into bankruptcy the next day, and consequently the album received minimal attention.Īs time went on, and Wilson’s Motown catalog became part of the Universal Music Group and its catalog division, the singer, author and activist not only recorded new socially relevant material, but hoped that her early solo material would be re-released in the digital age. The other two were rock and roll in the style of Tina Turner’s mid-‘80s hits I was certainly ahead of the time.”Įven gone from the Motown family, Wilson’s solo career got messy. “I was very excited about these four songs… it wasn’t the formula disco of my first album,” wrote Wilson in her autobiography, “Supreme Faith: Someday We’ll Be Together.” “Two of the songs were big ballads.
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