Released:1967
Everybody’s got to start somewhere. For struggling Detroit songwriter Berry Gordy, that beginning was with a singer called Jackie Wilson, who’d recently gone solo from sporadic hit makers the Dominoes, and one with a near unbreakable belief in his own talent.
With Gordy he would record and release a string of higher profile numbers in the late fifties, including I’ll Be Satisfied and Reet Petite, which would make him posthumously famous again three decades later. With a vocal range which put nearly all of his generation so shame, Wilson found a perhaps unlikely acolyte in Elvis Presley, whom he would vigorously defend from accusations of cultural appropriation.
Pop has always been a dog eat dog world however, and after Gordy went on to found the Motown empire Wilson’s profile dimmed against those of the upstarts launched by his former associate. (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher was the cornerstone of a brief renaissance late period; as is the way with casual genius over a simple arrangement his multi-octave voice generates enough soul power to light a thousand suns. Everybody began somewhere, and Berry Gordy’s luck proved to be everybody else’s too.
The Voice Of Unreason 
Unquestionably one of the best songs of that decade!
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