Who recorded it first
Devil with a Blue Dress On
Not a Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels original — a 1964 Shorty Long single on Motown
Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels’ frantic 1966 medley with ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ hit No. 4 and is so completely identified with the band that the song is generally taken to be theirs. It is not. ‘Devil with a Blue Dress On’ was written by Shorty Long with Motown A&R chief William ‘Mickey’ Stevenson, and Long recorded it first — issued in March 1964 as Soul 35001, the very first record released on Motown’s new Soul imprint. Long’s original is a slower, bluesier stomp, and it went nowhere: it missed the Hot 100 entirely and sat at No. 125 on the ‘Bubbling Under’ chart. The speed is Ryder’s invention; the song is Long’s.
The record
Who recorded it first
Released Issued in March 1964 as a 7-inch 45 on Soul 35001 — the first record ever released on Motown’s new Soul imprint, a subsidiary set up for its more blues-leaning artists. It was Shorty Long’s debut single for the label, backed with ‘Wind It Up’, and the A-side ran 2:49. The label read simply ‘Devil With The Blue Dress’ — the ‘On’ that every later discography attaches was not on the original release.
Charted Barely at all. It missed the Billboard Hot 100 and stalled at No. 125 on the ‘Bubbling Under’ chart. A figure of No. 26 R&B is widely repeated, but it should be treated with care: Billboard had suspended its R&B singles chart from 30 November 1963 until 23 January 1965, so there was no Billboard R&B chart in existence in March 1964 — and Wikipedia’s own article on Shorty Long says the single never charted nationally.
Hear Shorty Long’s 1964 Motown original — the slow one www.youtube.com · An auto-generated Art Track on the ‘Shorty Long - Topic’ channel; the description reads ‘Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group’ and carries a ℗ 1964 Motown Records line, confirming a 1964 phonogram rather than a later re-cut. Its 3:12 runtime matches the MusicBrainz entry for the 1964 master as reissued on The Complete Motown Singles, Volume 4: 1964; the 45 edit on Soul 35001 runs 2:49. Then compare Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ 1966 Bob Crewe–produced hit, which welds Shorty Long’s song to “Good Golly Miss Molly” in a single sprint — that medley is what the record actually is. www.youtube.com · Auto-generated upload on the “Mitch Ryder - Topic” channel; description reads “Provided to YouTube by Rhino · Devil with the Blue Dress On / Good Golly Miss Molly (Medley) · Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels · Breakout... !!! · ℗ 1966 Rhino/DynoVoice”, with “Auto-generated by YouTube”. Runtime 186s (3:06), an exact match to the MusicBrainz medley recording at 186000ms. Flagging the discrepancy honestly: a general MusicBrainz search on “Devil With a Blue Dress On” by Mitch Ryder returns a scatter of 204s, 214s, 215s and 235s entries drawn from later compilations and re-recordings — the ℗ 1966 DynoVoice line and the exact 186000ms medley match are what pin this copy to the original New Voice master rather than one of those. A second Topic upload (gIdjpN78mjs, 211s) had no distributor line I could read and was rejected.How we traced it
The song was written by Shorty Long and William ‘Mickey’ Stevenson and, in Wikipedia’s words, was ‘first recorded by Long in 1964’; the same page dates Mitch Ryder’s version to September 1966 on New Voice Wikipedia ↗.
The Motown singles chronicle Motown Junkies logs the release as ‘Soul S 35001 (A), March 1964’, backed with ‘Wind It Up’ — and notes that most discographies add an ‘On’ the original label never carried Motown Junkies ↗.
The discographic record agrees: MusicBrainz has the 1964 US 7-inch on Soul, catalogue 35001, with Shorty Long’s 2:49 A-side and ‘Wind It Up’ on the flip MusicBrainz ↗.
Wikidata is unambiguous about which record is the source: entity Q5267354 is described as ‘1964 single by Shorty Long’, with Ryder’s recording listed beneath it as a later performance Wikidata ↗.
Wikipedia — the 1964 original and every later versionKnow more about the original — or think we’ve got it wrong? Add a source →
Fact-check
The attribution problem
Nothing about the Mitch Ryder record is fake or wrong — it is simply a cover, and a spectacular one. The error is purely chronological: a 1966 hit taken for the point of origin, when the song had already been written, recorded and released on Motown by a man almost nobody remembers.
‘It’s a Mitch Ryder song’
Ryder’s version was released in September 1966 on New Voice. The song was written by Shorty Long and Mickey Stevenson and first recorded by Long in 1964 the history ↗.
Shorty Long, March 1964
Long’s single was the first record issued on Motown’s Soul imprint, backed with ‘Wind It Up’ and running 2:49 — a slower, bluesier reading of the same song the release ↗.
Shorty Long & William ‘Mickey’ Stevenson
Long wrote it and cut it; Stevenson, Motown’s head of A&R, co-wrote it. Both credits survive intact on the Ryder record — they are simply never read Stevenson ↗.
‘Devil With The Blue Dress’
The 1964 Soul label carried the title without the trailing ‘On’. The longer form most people know came with the cover and was retro-fitted to the original by later discographies.
Written by Shorty Long with Mickey Stevenson, first recorded by Long and released in March 1964 on Soul 35001, and made famous — but not originated — by Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels in 1966 the record ↗.
Context
Why the cover ate the original
A cover normally has to displace something to take over. This one did not: there was nothing in the way. Shorty Long’s original never reached the Billboard Hot 100 at all — it stopped at No. 125 on the ‘Bubbling Under’ chart — so by the time Mitch Ryder’s version arrived in 1966, the American listening public had, for practical purposes, never heard the song. Ryder’s record did not overwrite a memory; it created one.
What Ryder and producer Bob Crewe changed was tempo and context. Long’s 1964 record is a mid-paced, blues-rooted Motown stomp. Ryder’s is a sprint, welded to a rearrangement of Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ and cut at Bell Sound in New York into a single 3:01 rush. The medley form is the tell: nobody builds a medley out of a song they consider untouchable, and nobody hearing that version first would guess the source record was the slower one. Bruce Springsteen then spent decades playing it as part of his live ‘Detroit Medley’, which bolted the song even harder to Ryder’s city and Ryder’s tempo.
The two records, in order
- Shorty Long writes the song at Motown with the label’s head of A&R, William ‘Mickey’ Stevenson.
- Long records it and Motown issues it in March 1964 as Soul 35001 — the first release on the brand-new Soul imprint — backed with ‘Wind It Up’ and titled simply ‘Devil With The Blue Dress’.
- The original misses the Hot 100, reaching only No. 125 on ‘Bubbling Under’.
- Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels record it at Bell Sound Studios in New York with Bob Crewe producing, as a far faster medley with ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’.
- New Voice releases the medley in September 1966; it reaches No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and becomes the band’s biggest hit.
- Bruce Springsteen adopts it into his live ‘Detroit Medley’ from the 1970s onward, and it appears on the 1980 No Nukes concert album — in Ryder’s arrangement, at Ryder’s tempo.
The tempo is Mitch Ryder’s. The song is Shorty Long’s.