Baby Don't Go
| "Baby Don't Go" | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Single by Sonny & Cher | |
| B-side | ""Love Is Strange" or "Walking the Quetzel"" |
| Released | September 1964 September 1965 |
| Recorded | 1964 |
| Genre | Pop rock |
| Length | 3:05 |
| Label | Reprise |
| Songwriter(s) | Sonny Bono |
| Producer(s) | Sonny Bono |
"Baby Don't Go" is a song written by Sonny Bono and recorded by Sonny & Cher. It was first released on Reprise Records in 1964 and was a minor regional hit. Then following the duo's big success with "I Got You Babe" in the summer of 1965, "Baby Don't Go" was re-released by Reprise later that year and became another huge hit for Sonny & Cher, reaching the top ten in the U.S. and doing well in the UK and elsewhere, going as far as reaching number one in Canada.
Salvatore "Sonny" Bono and Cherilyn "Cher" Sarkisian-Lapierre were an aspiring duo, with Bono writing and producing songs for the couple under the name Caesar and Cleo but with little success. In 1964 they decided to change their act's name to Sonny & Cher, and signed with Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records. Reprise executives were apparently unaware that they already had Sonny & Cher signed as Caesar and Cleo.
Bono composed "Baby Don't Go" on an $85 upright piano that he had purchased and kept in the couple's garage or living room. Working in the middle of the night and lacking paper, Bono wrote the lyrics down on a piece of shirt cardboard, a practice he would continue with.
The musical arrangement features a rhythmic, rolling piano-and-harmonica foundation with a hyper-staccato electric guitar joining late in the verses. Lyrically, Cher sings as a poor 18-year-old girl from a broken family, unliked and frustrated in the small town she's lived in all her life. She shares her visions of going to a big city and becoming successful:
The choruses are sung by Sonny (with near-equal backing from Cher) as the girl's boyfriend who wants her to stay:
In the conclusion the girl resolves to remain emotionally stable when she reaches the city and says she might come back to see the boy again someday. Bono's portrait of the girl in the song was partly based on Cher's early life (and indeed Cher would revisit the theme of the social outcast in her early 1970s hits "Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves" and "Half-Breed").
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