Mickey & Sylvia – "Love Is Strange" (1956)

“How do you call your lover boy?”

“Come here, lover boy!”

(“Love is strange”?  Ya think?)

Mickey & Sylvia – Mickey Baker and Sylvia Vanderpool – sold a million-plus copies of “Love Is Strange” in 1956.

The duo broke up in 1959.  Baker moved to France in the sixties and stayed there until his death in 2012.  His Complete Course in Jazz Guitar books has remained in print for over 50 years.

Mickey & Sylvia

Sylvia married Joe Robinson (a former numbers runners who gave up that honest profession to become a record company owner) after the split with Mickey.  The couple later started Sugar Hill Records.

Sylvia produced the first big hip-hop hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” in 1979.  She may have inspired the character of Cookie Lyon on the Fox TV series, Empire.  (The two writers responsible for Empire were recently signed by Warner Brothers to write the screenplay for a planned Sylvia Robinson biopic.)

Here’s “Love Is Strange," which has been featured on the soundtracks of Deep Throat, Badlands, Dirty Dancing, Casino, The Wire, and The Sopranos:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: