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Song

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Originally written by
Language
English
Adapted from
She's Fine, She's Mine written by Bo Diddley
Comments
Tracing the maze of recycling, reissuing and reassigning of Willie Cobb's songs and masters is an endless task, but here's what Willie said about “You Don't Love Me”: he was living in Hughes, Arkansas, at the time, and went to Memphis to audition the song for Reuben Cherry at Home of the Blues. Cherry turned him down but Billy Lee Riley was there and asked Cobbs to record it, so Cobbs recorded it in Memphis with Lawhorn, Boyd (who was down from Chicago), et al. for Riley and Stan Kesler's Mojo label. Willie has said that the bass player was a white musician Riley hired. Willie is listed as the bass player on an Eddie Boyd 45 also recorded for Mojo. Mojo issued “You Don't Love Me” and then sold it to Cherry, who put it out on HOTB after all, then it went to Vee-Jay and also appeared on various other labels.

Cobbs claimed the song came to him as a vision and claimed no knowledge of the Bo Diddley song. But the case went to court several years ago and he said that 20% of the song was assigned to Bo Diddley. Willie has basically been living off the royalties from the many cover versions of the song and financing his own records in hopes of another hit. But he claims that he was never able to get royalties for Dawn Penn's hit version ("No, No, No"). Just within recent weeks he apparently agreed to a new split on the song rights with the son of the late J.O.B./Ruler Records/Lawn Music owner Joe Brown, who also had some claim to the song.

Sammy Lawhorn told me that the song dated back to an old record he couldn't remember by a woman singer. I've never been able to identify any such recording.
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