Songfacts®:

• "Let Love Come Between Us" was originally recorded by the Alabama group The Rubber Band earlier in 1967, and written by their members Joe Sobotka and Johnny Wyker. The Rubber Band was fronted by Johnny Townsend, who later had a hit with "Smoke From A Distant Fire" as half of the Sanford-Townsend Band. Townsend told us how the group came together: "My first experience in recording in Muscle Shoals area was at a studio over in Sheffield with Marlin Green. The recording was essentially a demo to help us get gigs. We recorded some James Brown and Otis Redding songs, about eight in all and had some acetates pressed up. I had been playing with a group of guys from Decatur and Tuscaloosa, The Rubber Band, and at the time, we were one of the most popular bands in Alabama even though we weren't doing it full time and most of us were still going to school. Later we started taking some of our gig money and going into the studio doing our songs we wrote ourselves, or by friends like Eddie Hinton. We recorded one of Eddie's songs called 'Down In Texas' at Rick Hall's FAME Studios. That's when I met Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. They'd been having some success as songwriters and really inspired us to start writing our own songs. They all seemed like characters out of a dime novel at first. They were full time into music, something that also inspired us to want to do it full time. Some of the stuff we had been recording got heard by a big time New York producer named Charlie Calello and he brought us up to New York where we recorded a song written by two of our members, Johnny Wyker and Joe Sobotka called 'Let Love Come Between Us.' Our version on Columbia Records was considered a turntable hit in that it went to #1 in 20 major cities in the US. Columbia didn't get any records in the stores because they didn't even know it was their record. We were such novices in the business that it got by us and was gone before we knew it. It did however give us a taste of success and we wanted more. That song was later recorded by James and Bobby Purify and went up the charts."
• The Purify's were the cousins James Purify and Robert Lee Dickey. They're biggest hit was "I'm Your Puppet" in 1966.
• Other artists to record this song include Mavis Staples, Delbert McClinton and The Pointer Sisters.