Cry Like a Baby is a 1968 album by the Box Tops. The title song was released as a single and reached #2 in April 1968 on the Billboard Hot 100chart, a position which it held for two weeks. It was kept out of the top spot by Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey".[1]
Background
Cry Like a Baby was the second Box Tops album to be recorded, and its April, 1968 release followed the group's debut by just five months. The group would continue working at this fast pace, and released its third album, Non Stop, later in the year.
Songwriter Dan Penn was once again the group's producer for Cry Like a Baby, and he was writer or co-writer for half of the album's songs, including the title track. Spooner Oldham co-wrote four of the songs with Penn and played keyboards on the album. Songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson, who had written the group's two hits, did not have any songs on the original LP version of the album, though he did return for the group's final two albums, and gave The Box Tops its final Top 40 hit.
Musician and record producer Jim Dickinson said of this album that it was "Memphis pop production at its best, on par with the great Dusty In Memphis, recorded by the same cast of characters in the same period. Those two records were as good as it gets."[2] According to Alex Chilton biographer Holly George-Warren, the studio band for all tracks except "You Keep Me Hangin' On" was the house band at America Sound Studio, sometimes known as "The Memphis Boys", augmented by Spooner Oldham on keyboards and other musicians playing brass, woodwind, and stringed instruments.[2] The Box Tops themselves accompanied Chilton on "You Keep Me Hangin' On", which uses the psychedelic rock arrangement of the song that was a hit for Vanilla Fudge. At the end of the song, Chilton sings the lyric "and he walked on down the hall" in a spoken word style similar to the vocal by Jim Morrison on the Doors song "The End" which was recorded and released the previous year.
Writing for Allmusic, music critic Steve Kurutz called the title song "a perfect slice of blue-eyed soul" and summarized; "All in all, with the exception of "Cry Like a Baby," an album that could've potentially contained some real gems just doesn't."[3]
^Hoffmann, Frank (1983). The Cash Box Singles Charts, 1950-1981. Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. p. 58.
^ abGeorge-Warren, Holly (March 2014). A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, from Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man. Viking. ISBN978-0-670-02563-3.
