Brother Louie by Hot Chocolate and Stories

The song “Brother Louie” was originally recorded in England by Hot Chocolate where it reached the top 10. It was covered by The Stories in the US where it reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart.

Hot Chocolate was an interracial (four black members, two white) group from London who had a hit in 1975 with "You Sexy Thing." Written by their lead singer Errol Brown and bass player Tony Wilson, "Brother Louie" is about a romance between a white man and a black woman.

Errol Brown was born in Jamaica and raised by a single mother, who moved him to England when he was young. He told Melody Maker that this song was inspired by real-life experience. "That comes from early dating in a place where there's mostly white people," he said. "That was fine for us because we grew up and rubbed shoulders with other nationalities, so it wasn't a heavy thing. But in those days a lot of white parents never had anything to do with black people. It was understandable – they just didn't know what was going on, apart from what they read in books or saw on TV: jungle scenes."

The Hot Chocolate version of this song didn't gain any traction in the United States, possibly because of the subject matter. The spoken sections portraying the parents' reactions to the interracial couple were rather graphic, using the epithets "Honky" and "Spook," which was enough to scare many radio stations away. About six months after Hot Chocolate's version was issued, the New York City group Stories recorded the song and released it as a single. Their version, which left out the spoken parts and a verse where Louie meets the girl's parents, featured a more pronounced string section and proved much more palatable to American listeners, and went to #1 in the US in August 1973. It was the only hit for Stories.

The lyrics within the song clearly speak about society's disapproval of interracial relationships, especially between a white man and a black woman:

She was black as the night;

Louie was whiter than white

Danger, danger when you taste brown sugar

Louie fell in love overnight

It is interesting to see how also the song makes the reference to brown sugar, relating us back to The Rolling Stones song “Brown Sugar” and the symbolism between sugar cane, slavery, and abuse of the female black body. The song covers the topic of how the black woman is a temptress, seductive, and able to be taken advantage of. It is always the typical story of the white male falling for the black woman that is portrayed in novels and poetry, mainly because it was common for the white male slaveowners to have sexual relations with their female slaves to display power and ownership.

In this song’s context however, there is a sense of sympathy and pity for Louie, because he appears to truly care for his black lover and is now just realizing the hardship they both must face to be accepted as a couple by society.  For once the white individual is feeling the pressure of being marginalized and judged due to the color of skin, something which Louie has perhaps never dealt with before.