No sexy innuendo for the ladies, just "sweet words"

I've been listening to Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection a lot lately. I think modern audiences can really appreciate this kind of music, made between '59 and '71, since in many ways it was the early danceable black pop.

Close cousins of R&B and funk, early motown songs were influenced by popular "romance" music of the day. While men worked around sexual codes, women were mostly restricted to more "ladylike" lyrics about love. And their songs were often written by men, such as "Beechwood."

This song gets its name from a now-dead phone number system used in the States and fits all the standard tropes. But of course there's a certain oomph to everything, an attitude that makes everything so much cooler than, say, the Carpenter's cover of this song on their back-to-our-roots album Made in America.