Baby Don't Go - Composition and Recording

Composition and Recording

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:

I never had no money, I bought at the second store

The way this old town laughs at me,

I just can't take it no more –

I can't stay ... I'm gonna be a lady some day

The choruses are sung by Sonny (with near-equal backing from Cher) as the girl's boyfriend who wants her to stay:

Baby don't go ... pretty baby please don't go

I love you so! Pretty baby please don't go

In the conclusion the girl resolves to remain emotionally together 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").

The recording was made at RCA's Hollywood Studios. Bono and the act's managers had to borrow and raise monies to fund the session, with the amount variously described as between $135 and $2,000 and the hocking of a typewriter and other office equipment involved. According to Cher, Leon Russell, Barney Kessel, and Don Randi (of what has since become known as The Wrecking Crew, and whom Bono knew from work with Spector at Gold Star Studios) participated in the recording at no cost.

The song was originally intended for only Cher to sing, but she got nervous and froze in the studio and asked Sonny to join her. She said later that the situation was like a classic Disney film: " me on the choruses, which was enough to take the pressure off me. Son was like Dumbo's good luck feather for me. If he was by my side, I had the confidence to do anything." Indeed, it was on this recording that Cher began to develop the assurance in her voice that would manifest itself in future hits. Moreover, the harmony scheme they adopted for the song – Cher signing low and Sonny doing the high part – was the opposite of the conventional male-female duo; it gave them a distinctive sound and they retained the practice on subsequent records.

Like other early Sonny & Cher material, "Baby Don't Go" was a well-produced pop effort. Bono's mentor Phil Spector liked the song and, for $500, bought a half share in its royalties, giving Bono some much-needed funding.