In January 1969, Tamla Records sent out a new Stevie Wonder single with a clear plan: the A-side was I Don’t Know Why, a gritty soul number lifted from his album For Once in My Life, and the job of the release was to keep that album’s campaign rolling. Stuck on the flip side, almost as an afterthought, was a gentle ballad that had been sitting in the Motown vault for a year — a song its own label’s quality-control people had decided was not A-side material. Within six months, radio disc jockeys across America had flipped the record over, the ballad had been re-released as an A-side in its own right, and it had climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. My Cherie Amour is one of the great love songs of the Motown era, and it arrived by the back door: written in about an hour by a schoolboy of sixteen, shelved by the most successful hit factory in America, and rescued by the DJs who were supposed to be playing the other side.
A Song Written in an Hour
The kernel of the song dates to 1966, when Wonder was a student at the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing, Michigan. There he had a girlfriend named Marsha (the name also appears as Marcia), and, by his own oft-told account, he wrote a song for her in a single hour. Its title was simply Oh, My Marsha. “I wrote it when I was, like, 16 years old,” Wonder told CNN in 2019. “Originally, the song was called ‘Oh My Marsha,’ which I wrote for a girl I used to like named Marsha. But we broke up, and I asked Sylvia (Moy) to change the words, and it turned into ‘My Cherie Amour.'”
By 1966 Wonder was already a veteran by any normal standard: signed to Tamla at the age of eleven, a No. 1 artist at thirteen with the live recording Fingertips, and a fixture of the Motown Revue tours. Yet he was still, in the eyes of Michigan law and of Motown’s own chaperones, a schoolboy, and his education at Lansing was fitted around his touring schedule. The song he wrote there was not a product of the hit factory at all — it was a private piece of work, composed at a school piano, about a school romance.
That transformation happened because Berry Gordy heard something in the teenager’s tune. The Motown founder listened to the song and felt it could be a contender with further development, so he brought in two of his most trusted staff collaborators: songwriter Sylvia Moy, who had rescued Wonder’s career three years earlier by writing Uptight (Everything’s Alright) with him, and producer-songwriter Henry Cosby, a guiding hand on many of Wonder’s early records. Moy and Cosby worked the song over with its author and took co-writing credit alongside him. It was Moy who supplied the finishing touch and the title. Borrowing the bilingual charm of the Beatles’ Michelle, a massive hit in 1966, she recast the lyric in a mixture of English and French: “My cherie amour” — my dear love. The schoolboy’s song to a specific girl had become something more universal, addressed to a beloved who is, in the song’s famous opening image, “lovely as a summer’s day” yet “distant as the Milky Way.”
Recorded in Three Sessions, Shelved for a Year
Cosby produced the record in the classic Motown manner, in pieces. The instrumental track — everything except horns and strings — was cut on November 8, 1967, at Hitsville U.S.A., the converted garage studio on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit where the Funk Brothers built the Motown sound. Nine days later, on November 17, the horns and strings were added at Golden World, the larger Detroit studio Motown had bought in 1967 to serve as its Studio B. Wonder’s own lead vocal came last, on January 15, 1968, weeks after he had been photographed rehearsing in the Netherlands as a seventeen-year-old touring star.
The finished record was a thing of unusual delicacy for 1967 Motown. Where the label’s biggest hits of the period drove hard, My Cherie Amour sways: Cosby’s production gives the song a gentle Latin lilt beneath the strings, a rhythm that rolls rather than punches, and Wonder’s vocal rides on top of it with a tenderness that the quality-control panel perhaps mistook for slightness. It is, in effect, a bossa nova-inflected ballad smuggled into the soul catalogue — precisely the quality Cash Box would later single out when it praised the record’s “slight Latin underbeat.”
Then — nothing. The record was shelved for a year. Wonder later suggested that Motown’s quality-control meetings, the famously ruthless Friday sessions at which new recordings were voted up or down, simply did not hear it as a single. “It was just that the various people at ‘quality control’ felt it was not the appropriate song to make an A-side,” he recalled. So when the song finally escaped the vault on January 28, 1969, it did so in disguise: as the B-side of I Don’t Know Why, a single drawn from For Once in My Life and timed to stretch that album’s chart life a little longer.
The Flip Side Takes Over
The A-side did respectably and no more: I Don’t Know Why peaked at No. 39 on the pop chart in March 1969. But something odd was happening underneath it. Deejays around the country were turning the single over and playing the ballad on the back, and listeners were responding. Wonder fell off the Hot 100 altogether in April and most of May, yet the groundswell for the flip side kept building until Tamla surrendered to it and re-released My Cherie Amour to radio as an A-side.
The reissued single entered the Hot 100 on May 31, 1969, at No. 70, and climbed for two months straight. In the first week of August it peaked at No. 4 — Wonder’s eighth Top 10 hit — and in the same week it also reached No. 4 on Billboard‘s R&B chart. Cash Box ranked it a notch higher, at No. 3, and it reached No. 3 on Billboard‘s Easy Listening chart as well, proof of how completely the song crossed over from soul radio to the adult mainstream. The trade papers had seen it coming: Cash Box called it “a haunting ballad with a slight Latin underbeat,” while Billboard praised Wonder’s “poignant reading” and predicted it would “quickly surpass sales of the original side” — one of the great understatements in chart history.
The success was not confined to America. The single reached No. 14 in Canada and No. 9 in Ireland, and Wonder spent June and July of 1969 touring Britain, where Motown seized the moment to release the song as a UK single. It entered the British chart in late July and, five weeks later, matched its American peak at No. 4, a position it held for three consecutive weeks in a fifteen-week chart run. Back home, it finished 1969 as Billboard‘s No. 32 record of the year and No. 23 on the magazine’s year-end R&B list — a remarkable showing for a record that had spent the year’s first quarter as somebody else’s B-side.
An Album Built Around a B-Side
Motown moved quickly to cash in. Wonder had also recorded the song in Spanish, as Mi Querido Amor, and in Italian, as My Cherie Amor, and on August 29, 1969, the label released a whole album programmed around the hit, My Cherie Amour — a collection of romantic material with the title track leading Side 1. It was an extraordinary reversal of fortune: a song deemed unfit to front a single was now fronting an entire LP. The album’s momentum carried its follow-up single, Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday, to No. 7 on the pop chart before the year was out.
In hindsight, the episode says a great deal about both Motown and its young artist. Gordy’s quality-control system was built to catch hits, and by every commercial measure it worked; but it had nearly buried one of the most durable recordings in the catalogue, and it took the unplanned democracy of radio deejays flipping a 45 to correct the mistake. Wonder, still only nineteen when the song peaked, had written its melody and its emotional core three years earlier, in an hour, at a school piano.
The Standard He Wrote at Sixteen
My Cherie Amour has never really left the repertoire. It became one of Wonder’s signature ballads, a standard of the wedding-band and easy-listening circuits, and a fixture of his concerts across six decades. Britain eventually certified the single Silver, decades after its three weeks at No. 4 there. In 2014, British DJ Philip George built his single Wish You Were Mine around a sample of the record; released in the last days of December, it entered the UK chart at No. 2 in January 2015 — held off the top only by Uptown Funk — and topped the UK Dance Chart, a new generation dancing to a melody written in 1966.
Its most affectionate tribute may be a comedy sketch. In May 1983, Wonder hosted Saturday Night Live and appeared alongside Eddie Murphy — then famous partly for his uncanny Wonder impersonation — in a sketch about a hopeless Stevie Wonder impersonator. Murphy’s character demonstrates how the great man should sing, launching into the opening of My Cherie Amour, before Wonder, in character, takes the song back and finishes it in his own unmistakable voice, bringing the house down. The joke only worked because everyone in the room knew the song by heart. It had begun as a teenager’s valentine to a girl named Marsha; by then, it belonged to everybody.