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Legendary Motown act Gladys Knight & The Pips present their 1971 album If I Were Your Woman, featuring the title track Billboard #1 Best-Selling Soul single for 1970-71. Gladys Knight and the Pips spent the whole of the 1960s polishing their reputation as one of the most luminous jewels in the Motown crown. As the decade turned, their relationship with the company may only have had another three years or so to run, but their soulful standards remained sky-high, as underlined by the brilliance of the ballad we remember on this album, their final Motown R&B No.1 “If I Were Your Woman.” After an initial breakthrough on Vee-Jay in 1961 with the chart-topping “Every Beat Of My Heart,” the family group from Atlanta bestowed Berry Gordy’s empire with a succession of glorious recordings. They included the pre-Marvin Gaye, 1967 No.1 version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and numerous other major R&B and crossover hits including “The End Of Our Road,” “The Nitty Gritty,” and “Friendship Train.” 1970 had already provided Knight and the Pips with a Top 3 success via “You Need Love Like I Do (Don’t You).” Then a song that chimed in with the then-current rise of the Women’s Lib movement arrived circuitously at their door. “If I Were Your Woman” was a stirring ballad written by the prolific composer Pam Sawyer and writer-artist Gloria Jones, best known for her original version (and Northern Soul hymn) of “Tainted Love” (and, later, for being Marc Bolan’s partner). The man who pointed the song in Knight’s direction was Norman Whitfield, who was producing and (with Barrett Strong) co-writing the group’s hits of the time. The lyrical sentiment was, at first, a little too strident for the singer’s liking, but thankfully she relented. With her spine-chilling vocal performance and the Pips as dependably soulful as ever, the song entered the R&B chart on November 8, 1970.