Who'd She Coo?

Album: Contradiction (1976)
Charted: 43 18
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Songfacts®:

  • This mellow funk track was the Ohio Players' last #1 hit on the R&B chart. The song title didn't make much sense to anyone, not even lead singer Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner.

    "That's another one that didn't make any sense to me," he told Fred Bronson, author of The Billboard Book Of #1 Hits. "Titles like 'Who'd She Coo?' - what does that mean? You have a great track. And if you can't find anything to do with it, you just do something stupid. But you know it's going to be a hit because the track is so great and people don't care. And usually if it's something that's crazy, they'll love it even more."
  • With Contradiction, their eighth studio album, the band wanted to shake up their style, which was a hybrid of jazz, funk, and rock. Trumpeter Ralph "Pee Wee" Middlebrook, who was still recovering after a head-on collision, still managed to make the recording session. He told Bronson: "We did the tune and it sounded kind of backwards to me. But we had to change around - we had to do something different. We were mixing jazz and rock and it was working the first 15 years. But we had to do something real weird. And this is what came out of that album. We were trying to be something else. We didn't want to go into the studio and come out with the same type of album we had been coming out with. We were mostly a jazz group [in the beginning]. So we were like on one side of the street. By playing jazz, we were doing albums but they weren't selling. So we decided to take rock and meet in the middle of the street with the rock and the jazz, and then we started selling both."
  • The original take was nearly 30 minutes long and was pared down to 4:32 for the album.
  • The band wasn't satisfied with the album at first because there were so many finishing touches they didn't have time to add, such as two more vocal phrases they planned for this tune and horns for "Far East Mississippi." But it managed to grow on sax player Clarence "Satch" Satchell. He told Blues & Soul in 1976: "But the more I listen to it, the happier I get and I end up by asking myself that if it had been an immediate reaction, it would have left nothing to come. And if the message was that easy to discover, then we hadn't achieved our own goal."
  • Contradiction was the group's fourth consecutive #1 album on the R&B chart. It also peaked at #12 on the US albums chart.

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