The 1970s File Feature
That's What Love Will Make You Do
Recording and Chart History of "That's What Love Will Make You Do" Little Milton, born James Milton Campbell Jr. in Inverness, Mississippi in 1934, was one o…
01 The Story
Recording and Chart History of "That's What Love Will Make You Do"
Little Milton, born James Milton Campbell Jr. in Inverness, Mississippi in 1934, was one of the most accomplished and stylistically versatile blues-soul vocalists and guitarists of his generation. His career spanned decades and multiple record labels, and he brought to his recordings a combination of technical guitar proficiency, expressive vocal range, and the kind of lived emotional authenticity that distinguished the great Mississippi blues tradition he had absorbed in his formative years. By the time he reached Chess Records in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Milton had already built a substantial catalog at Stax Records' Volt imprint, where he had achieved R&B chart success through the 1960s.
His period at Chess Records, which distributed the Checker label where his early recordings had appeared, connected him to a legendary institution in African American music history. Chess had been home to foundational figures including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley, and the label's legacy of blues and rhythm and blues recording gave it a particular significance in the history of American music. By the early 1970s, Chess was navigating a period of ownership transition following the deaths of founders Leonard and Phil Chess, and the label's commercial trajectory was uncertain, but it remained a meaningful institutional context for artists like Milton who carried the southern blues tradition into contemporary soul music.
"That's What Love Will Make You Do" was recorded for Checker during this period, and the production reflected the hybrid approach that characterized Milton's work at its best: a foundation rooted in blues guitar traditions combined with soul production values appropriate to the early 1970s commercial market. The result was a record that could appeal to listeners who valued the blues authenticity Milton represented while remaining accessible to the broader R&B audience that had less direct investment in the blues tradition specifically.
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 during the chart week of February 12, 1972, entering at position 96. It climbed steadily through the following weeks, reaching 74 on February 19, then 68 on February 26, then 65 on March 4. The song reached its peak position of number 59 during the week of March 11, 1972, completing a six-week chart run before departing the Hot 100. The chart performance was solid for an artist working in a blues-inflected idiom that occupied a somewhat specialized niche within the broader R&B landscape.
On the R&B charts, Milton's recordings consistently performed at higher levels than his Hot 100 positions indicated. His core audience was the African American listening public, particularly in the South and among urban listeners in major northern cities who maintained connections to the blues tradition through their own migration histories. These listeners supported Milton's recordings through R&B radio airplay and retail sales that the Hot 100 methodology of the early 1970s did not always fully capture.
Milton continued recording prolifically through the 1970s and 1980s, moving between labels and maintaining a touring schedule that kept him in regular contact with his core audience. He recorded for Glades Records, MCA, and Malaco Records during subsequent phases of his career, with the Malaco period in the 1980s and beyond proving particularly fruitful. Malaco had positioned itself as a primary label for traditional Southern soul and blues, and Milton found there a home that was entirely aligned with his artistic identity.
His legacy was honored through multiple Grammy Award nominations and through the continued respect of blues and soul musicians who cited him as an influence. Little Milton's particular synthesis of blues guitar technique, gospel-influenced vocal power, and soul production sophistication represented one of the most complete expressions of what the transition from blues to soul had accomplished in American popular music, and recordings like "That's What Love Will Make You Do" served as evidence of that synthesis at a specific moment in its commercial and artistic development.
02 Song Meaning
Themes and Meaning in "That's What Love Will Make You Do"
"That's What Love Will Make You Do" belongs to a well-established tradition of blues and soul songs that examine romantic feeling as a transformative and sometimes disorienting force, capable of causing behaviors that the rational self might not endorse but that the feeling heart finds unavoidable. Little Milton was particularly well positioned to interpret this theme, given his deep roots in a blues tradition that had always been candid about the ways romantic and erotic attachment could override self-interest and rational judgment.
The song's title functions as a kind of explanatory refrain, attributing a range of implicitly described behaviors or feelings to the agency of love itself. This grammatical construction, in which love becomes the subject of the sentence and the narrator its object, was a convention with deep roots in the blues tradition. By positioning himself as acted upon by love rather than as an agent making choices, the narrator participates in a familiar emotional narrative that acknowledged vulnerability without entirely surrendering dignity. The external attribution of behavior to love rather than to personal weakness was a form of emotional management that resonated with listeners who recognized the experience.
The blues context carries specific meaning here because the genre had developed over decades a particularly nuanced vocabulary for discussing the emotional consequences of romantic attachment. Where pop songwriting of the era might have treated similar themes with more optimistic framing, blues-influenced material was characteristically willing to acknowledge the less comfortable dimensions of romantic experience: the loss of control, the irrational behavior, the willingness to endure difficulty for the sake of continued connection. Milton's vocal delivery drew on this blues tradition, adding layers of emotional weight to lyrics that might have seemed simpler in a different performer's interpretation.
The soul production context of the early 1970s gave the song a contemporary commercial dimension that extended its potential audience beyond the core blues listenership. Soul music had absorbed and transformed many blues conventions, retaining the genre's emotional directness and its willingness to examine romantic experience with honesty while making those qualities accessible to listeners who did not identify primarily with the blues tradition. The crossover potential of this approach was evident in the song's moderate Hot 100 success, which indicated some degree of mainstream pop radio acceptance alongside its more predictable R&B chart performance.
Love as a force that compels action beyond rational planning is one of the most durable themes in the entire history of popular song, appearing across genres and eras in forms that range from comic to tragic. Milton's engagement with this theme placed him within a continuous tradition of popular music that had always found its most commercially successful and emotionally resonant material in the territory of romantic feeling and its consequences. The specificity of the genre, the blues-inflected delivery, the southern soul production values, gave this particular treatment of the theme a flavor that distinguished it from more polished mainstream treatments of similar material.
The song also reflects the period's general interest in adult relationship dynamics as a subject for serious musical exploration. By 1972, the singer-songwriter movement had expanded the thematic ambition of mainstream popular music, and R&B artists were similarly engaged in more sophisticated explorations of romantic and emotional experience than had characterized earlier commercial pop. "That's What Love Will Make You Do" participated in this broader expansion of thematic range, bringing the blues tradition's characteristic emotional honesty into conversation with the more ambitious lyrical and emotional territory that early-1970s popular music was increasingly willing to occupy.
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