"Ooh Baby (You Know That I Love You)" is a song by English musician George Harrison, released in 1975 on his album Extra Texture (Read All About It). Harrison wrote the composition as a tribute to American singer Smokey Robinson, whom he often identified as one of his favourite vocalists and songwriters. The song was intended as a companion piece to Robinson's 1965 hit with the Miracles, "Ooo Baby Baby", and its inclusion on Extra Texture contributed to that album's standing as Harrison's soul music album. His impersonation of Robinson's celebrated vocal style on the track, including portions sung in falsetto, contrasted with Harrison's hoarse, laryngitis-marred singing on his 1974 North American tour and the poorly received Dark Horse album.
Harrison recorded "Ooh Baby" at A&M Studios in Los Angeles between April and June 1975, with backing from rock musicians Jesse Ed Davis, Gary Wright, Klaus Voormann and Jim Keltner. In addition, the recording features an overdubbed horn section comprising Tom Scott and Chuck Findley. The song's sombre tone and slow tempo reflect Harrison's dejected mood following the criticism of his tour the previous year. Partly as a result of these solemn qualities, the track is held in low regard by several music critics. Some commentators instead highlight "Pure Smokey", released on Harrison's 1976 album Thirty Three & 1/3, as the more effective of his tributes to Robinson.
Background
George Harrison biographer Alan Clayson has written that, while all of the Beatles were influenced by Tamla-Motown artists in the early and mid 1960s, Harrison "listened hardest" to the Miracles, and particularly the group's lead singer, Smokey Robinson. In interviews during the 1970s, Harrison frequently praised Robinson as a vocalist and a songwriter, and once described him as having an "effortless butterfly of a voice". While the influence of soul music had been evident in Harrison's 1971 hit song "What Is Life", it was a genre that he began to embrace more obviously later in the decade, beginning with his 1974 collaboration with Faces guitarist Ron Wood, "Far East Man". Harrison's version of that song appeared on his Dark Horse album, a release that, like his concurrent North American tour with Ravi Shankar, was vilified by some sections of the music press, notably Rolling Stone magazine, a publication that had traditionally championed his work.
This critical backlash left Harrison emotionally battered, and came as a further source of personal upheaval following his split with wife Pattie Boyd in July 1974. Author Robert Rodriguez remarks on Harrison's choice of musical direction for his next album, Extra Texture (Read All About It): "Since it developed into a discernible genre in the late '50s/early '60s, soul [music] – as an outgrowth of blues – was the medium of choice among the oppressed to express their interactions with a world (or a romantic partner) that often misunderstood or abused them. As such, it proved the perfect format for George in his efforts to work through his many issues."
Harrison wrote the slow soul ballad "Ooh Baby (You Know That I Love You)" in the spring of 1975, shortly before starting recording for Extra Texture. The song was Harrison's musical tribute to Robinson. In an interview held at his Los Angeles home that April, with disc jockey Dave Herman, Harrison included Smokey Robinson among his preferred artists, along with Shankar, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and added: "Musically, he's so sweet ... he makes you feel nice – he makes me feel good."
Composition
In his musical biography of George Harrison, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Simon Leng describes the song as a "spiritual brother" to the Miracles' 1965 hit "Ooo Baby Baby". Leng writes that Harrison employs "all manner of subtle chord voices" in the composition, including "elegant, jazzy thirteenths and major ninths". Author Ian Inglis comments on Harrison's "unexpectedly mournful" melody and suggests that the song "betray[s] a continuing, pessimistic reflection on recent events and circumstances in his life".
In an example of what Clayson identifies as the sparse, "cursory" lyrics found on much of Extra Texture, the words to the chorus in "Ooh Baby (You Know That I Love You)" repeat and improvise on the song title. Inglis describes this lyrical approach as "simplistic" and "seek[ing] to create emotion through mere repetition".
In the two verses, Harrison tells his lover – presumably Olivia Arias, Inglis suggests, his girlfriend and constant companion since October 1974: