Every Song I Love is a series where I attempt to write about every song that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.

I didn’t totally get soul music when I was young. Sure, there were soul songs I liked, mainly the obvious ones like ‘Respect’ or ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, but I didn’t really feel them, not deep down. Back then my emotions were mainly stirred by the angry/sad men and women with guitars. If I’d been ranking my very favourite songs (which I almost certainly was, given my lifelong propensity for making lists), you wouldn’t have found many, if any, soul records at the top.

If there were one exception, it would have been “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing” by Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell, the opening track on a cheap Motown compilation CD I’d picked up in an attempt to expand my musical horizons. I knew about Marvin Gaye of course, given he was one of the most famous singers of all time in any genre, but Terrell was new to me. Her voice is sublime on the track, complementing Gaye’s perfectly, and she immediately stood out, even amongst the many greats of that label. In other hands this could have been a fairly ordinary song, just one of hundreds of good but lesser Motown tracks, but those voices elevated it to something special. Even I could recognise that.

Despite being a voracious consumer of music, music papers, music magazines, music TV, I never heard about Terrell in any other context than her duets with Gaye, of which there were many, almost uniformly excellent. This was in the pre-internet days, so I couldn’t just look her up. It seemed strange that such a great singer, on the most famous record label of all time, could remain so obscure, but so it seemed to be. Somewhere along the way I read an article about how she suffered from domestic abuse throughout her life, and then died tragically young at age 24 from a brain tumour. Even that article was framed in the context of her relationships with men, her musical partnership and friendship with Gaye as well the way she was treated by romantic partners such as James Brown and David Ruffin. For many years, this remained the sum of my knowledge, that she had recorded duets with Marvin Gaye and had a short, brutal life.

Fast forward to 2009 and I met the women who would become my wife, and music was how we connected. We met at a music festival and exchanged mix CDs by post during the early long distance phase of our relationship. Her taste in music overlapped with mine, but was also different in a way that is difficult to capture in a sentence or two. I think she has a great sense of when a song is true, when it comes from the heart. When she loves a song, she really loves it, with no thought for other peoples opinions, or whether it fits with preconceptions of her taste. She loves soul music as a genre, but also soul music in the truest sense, music that comes from the soul, that nourishes the soul, regardless of genre.

I, at the time we met, was not yet totally comfortable in my own skin and this was reflected in many ways, including my music taste (or at least how I presented it). My love for music had for a long time been used in lieu of a personality. I was the one in my friendship group who knew the most about music, who cared the most about it. Without that, I felt, I was nothing. But meeting my wife helped me discover my true self, and music became an expression of that self, not a way of hiding it. You can can see the change in me even between the first and second CDs I sent to her. The first was intended to impress, to make me seem cool. The second was purely from the heart. It’s not a coincidence that the second included the small handful of soul songs I truly loved.

My wife opened me up to a number of genres that I had thought were not especially for me, not only soul, but blues and country and more. She introduced me to many wonderful songs, of which the finest was ‘All I Do Is Think About You’ by Tammi Terrell, re-appearing in my life after all this time. It was written by Stevie Wonder, and recorded by Terrell in 1966, but not released until decades later. It’s a wonderfully romantic mid-tempo soul song, not quite ballad, but not really made for the dancefloor either. It’s arranged perfectly to showcase Terrell’s voice, lush, but not overly so. The lyrics are direct and heartfelt, and when she sings “you make my soul a burning fire” you truly believe it. Listening to this song I finally understood Terrell as more than just a foil for Gaye, more than a partner for other better known singers. I saw her for the great talent she was in her own right, the next Motown star she could have been had she had the chance.

The honesty and depth of the love that ‘All I Do’ displays made it a special song for my wife-to-be and I, so much so that we chose it for the first dance at our wedding. Dancing is always quite a loose description when it comes to me, but as we swayed in each others arms, trying to ignore the fact that all our friends and family were gathered around watching us, I looked into her eyes and thought of the ways she had changed me. Opening me up to soul music was the least of it, she opened up my soul too. I must have had a soul before we met, I guess, but I’m not sure I’d ever located it, and certainly no-one else had. She had helped me find a way to open up, to express myself, to love and be loved. And in her way, from the distant past, Tammi Terrell had helped with that too, and this was why we chose her song.

Today would have been Terrell’s 80th birthday, but she didn’t have chance to live anywhere close to that long. I can only hope that I am lucky enough to one day celebrate that milestone for myself. If I do, I hope I’ll still be listening to Tammi Terrell, her music giving her an immortality that she herself never had, and that my wife will be by my side, still making my soul a burning fire.