Tuesday 12-inch Flashback: ‘This Time Baby’

Here’s a real nice one from 1979, a bona fide disco classic by Jackie Moore (though it only reached No. 24 on Billboard’s R&B chart).

I just learned that “This Time Baby” was originally done by the O’Jays... for their 1978 LP “So Full of Love.” Click here to hear the O’Jays version on my Vox blog.

Philly session man Bobby Eli, who played guitar on the O’Jays album, produced the Jackie Moore remake.

Hardcore soul fans know that Mr. Eli is active online. So I dropped him a note and asked him how the Jackie Moore version came to be.

“Jackie and I were trying to find one or two special songs with which to round out [her] album,” Eli wrote back, “and somehow in our discussions the O’Jays’ name came up, and almost instinctively we both brought up ‘This Time Baby’ as a fave, and I then blurted out, ‘Well then, why don’t we do a dancey version and see what happens?’

“And the next day, that’s exactly what we did, with Atlantic Starr providing the backing track.” Remixer John Luongo did his thing for the 12-inch, and the rest is history.

One last tidbit: “This Time Baby” was written by Bell & James, who became gold-record performers in ’79 with “Livin’ It Up (Friday Night).”