Songfacts®:

• In the smash 1974 single "Lady Marmalade," Patti LaBelle and her namesake vocal trio told the story of a New Orleans prostitute who propositioned a man in French by asking, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?" or "Do you want to go to bed with me tonight?"
  
  In "Teach Me Tonight (Me Gusta Tu Baile)," a single from her second solo album, Tasty, Patti ditches French for Spanish, singing, "Me gusta tu baile," meaning, "I like your dance," to a dancer she has her eye on. But she's really interested in learning some of his other moves.
  
  "Although people will figure it's about dancing - it's not!" she told Blues & Soul in 1978. "It's about making love!"
• The song grew out of a melody Patti came up with during the "Lady Marmalade" sessions. She asked James "Budd" Ellison, her musical director who played piano on the track, to remember it for her so she could stop distracting her groupmates with it.
  
  "The other girls were wondering when I was going to stop too - it was real funny - I just kept on ad-libbing on this melody," she recalled. "Anyway, we had the song ready for the first solo album [but it was saved for the second album] and it was Budd's idea about doing it with the Spanish thing."
• LaBelle doesn't speak Spanish, so she invited a couple of Spanish guys to the studio to help her get the right inflections. "I ended up singing it through my nose to get the right sound!" she recalled.
• While her early solo efforts were critically acclaimed, it took years for LaBelle to achieve her commercial breakthrough with albums like I'm In Love Again (1983) and Winner In You (1986). Tasty just managed to sneak into the Top 40 on the R&B Albums chart, with "Teach Me Tonight" petering out at #51 on the R&B Songs chart.
• Recording the Tasty album was a challenge for the powerhouse vocalist, who had to tone down her singing to achieve the sound she wanted.
  
  "You see, I've always wanted to sing an album 'straight'. By that I mean, no riffs, no high notes all the way through. It's been a challenge to me to do something like that because I wanted people to see another side of me. So I had to learn to actually undersing on it - and believe me, it was hard as hell!" she told Blues & Soul.
  
  "Every time we'd get ready to do a take on the album, I'd immediately be inclined to climb right up to those high notes - what we could call the 'Patti parts'! So we had to stop and start all over again. In fact, I did close to forty takes on some of the songs to get them right!"