Robbed hit of the week 11/17/14 - Stephanie Mills' "I Have Learned To Respect The Power Of Love"...

Stephanie Mills - "I Have Learned To Respect The Power Of Love"
from the album Stephanie Mills (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: did not chart pop

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the singer and actress who got her start on the stage, Stephanie Mills. A child prodigy who wowed audiences at the Apollo in Harlem, Mills released her first album in 1974. But it wasn't until she starred on Broadway in The Wiz, an African-American take on the movie The Wizard Of Oz, that her career took off. Changing genres to disco and signing with 20th Century records, she landed her first top-40 pop hit/top-10 R&B hit with "What Cha Gonna Do With My Lovin'" in 1979. The follow-up single from the album, "You Can Get Over", got her on the dance club play top-ten as well. A year later, her career pinnacle, "Never Knew Love Like This Before", was released from her next album, and climbed to #6 on the pop chart and #5 on the dance and adult contemporary genre lists in Billboard. Another single, the lite-disco duet "Two Hearts" with Teddy Pendergrass, also made the pop top-40 and peaked at #3 on the R&B chart.

However, as the backlash against disco fired up the early 80s, Mills found herself in musical limbo, still enjoying success on R&B radio, but being ignored by mainstream pop stations. She had a minor hit in 1984 with her club chart-topper "The Medicine Song", but pop radio was growing cold. Rather than capitulate to the trends of the day (a la Patti LaBelle, who redeemed that with her voice), Stephanie evolved her sound into a more adult-soul direction, and the first big result of that is her 1986 single "I Have Learned To Respect The Power Of Love". Written by the recording duo Rene (Moore) and Angela (Winbush), who were riding high on the R&B charts with their Street Called Desire album, the song brought her to a new audience that was bringing the sophisticated side of soul into its own in the mid-80s...

While "I Have Learned To Respect..." became Mills' first #1 R&B record in May of 1986, the single failed to even dent the pop Hot 100. She would go on to top the R&B chart four more times, yet only managed to nick the pop chart with one of them, "(You're Puttin') A Rush On Me", which landed at #85 in 1987 (and damned well deserved to be a much bigger pop hit). She continued her success on soul radio up to her most recent top-40 R&B hit, "Never Do You Wrong" in 1993...

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and here's Stephanie singing it live...