Temptations – "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" (1972)

Never heard nothin' but bad things about him

Momma I'm depending on you

To tell me the truth

If you can’t handle the truth, “Papa Was a Rollin' Stone” isn’t the song for you.  Because it delivers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

That truth isn’t complicated – it’s as plain as the nose on your face that the father who is the subject of the song wasn't a good man.  

For one thing, he “never worked a day in his life,” preferring to spend his time “chasing women and drinking.”

And rumor has it that he had three “outside” children and another wife in addition to the woman who stoically deflects her sons’ questions about the father they never met.

It’s bad enough that he simply abandoned that woman and his sons – apparently without regrets.  It’s even worse that he did nothing to provide for their support, either during his life or after his death.  (“When he died,” the mother says, “all he left us was alone.”)

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Records changed a lot over the course of what I like to call the “Golden Decade” of pop music (1964 to 1974).  If you like your re

Motown became world-famous on the strength of its sub-three-minute hit singles.  But the single version of “Papa Was a Rollin' Stone” was almost seven minutes long – by far the longest Motown single to date.  (The album version ran about twelve minutes.)

The Temptations

The song was written by the greatest of the Motown songwriter/producer teams, Barrett Strong and the late Norman Whitfield, who were behind not only most of the Temptations’ best records (including “Cloud Nine,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” and “Ball of Confusion”) but also “War” (a #1 hit for Edwin Starr), “Smiling Faces Sometime” (the Undisputed Truth), and the greatest Motown record of all, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

One of Strong and Whitfield’s first collaborations was a now-forgotten 1962 record by Marvin Gaye titled “Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home).”  They recycled that title to good effect in the chorus of today’s featured song – the last but certainly not the least of this year’s class of 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HALL OF FAME inductees.

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Click here to listen to the single version of “Papa Was a Rollin' Stone,” which was not only a #1 hit but also won three Grammys (including “Best R&B Song”).

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon: