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Melodies International proudly moves forward with an elusive piece of mid-tempo Chicago soul originally performed by Gloria J. Jennings in 1977. Gloria was signed to Stage Productions as a gospel singer with pure and raw talent she had developed in the choir of her father’s Southern Baptist Church. She was 16 years old at the time. To tutor her for R&B vocals, Willie C. Nance of Stage Productions spent 3 months taking the artist back and forth for vocal training 25 miles each way, 3 days per week. At the time, Mr. Nance had made plans to work with singer and songwriter Theresa Eagins to record “Know What You Want". However, two days before the recording was set to begin, Ms. Eagins refused to move forward with the recording as she chose to take her religious faith more seriously and forgo the singing of secular music. Hence, Stage Productions turned to Gloria Jay to perform a song that would go on to move people thousands of miles away, many years later. One of them was Patrick Forge: “Back around 1990 I had a residency upstairs at the Wag Club on a Friday night alongside Paul Martin (he was Gilles P’s A&R right hand man at Talkin’ Loud), the night was called Respect and we played mainly Soul, Boogie and Jazz-Funk. Many years later I bumped into Paul at a record shop and he quizzed me about a tune I used to play at the end of the night at Respect. He described it as being an independent Soul seven inch on a red label, slow to mid-tempo… and more to the point a bullet of a record. It piqued my curiosity so much I burrowed through my seven inches and even made Paul a compilation of likely contenders; his response was “lovely selection, but it’s not on there!". Damn, a mystery