First Choice – Doctor Love

Rochelle Fleming was twenty-three when she sang it, and the pop chart stopped it one place short of the Top 40

Rochelle Fleming was twenty-three when Doctor Love came out in the summer of 1977, and she had already been fronting First Choice for six years. The song was the group’s first single for Gold Mind, the new label of their longtime producer Norman Harris. On the pop chart it fell one place short of the Top 40. In the clubs it never really stopped: Salsoul sent it back out in new mixes in 1983, 1993 and 2017. Fleming died in Philadelphia on November 5, 2026, at 72, and the voice on this record is a good place to start remembering her.

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She started at Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia, singing with classmates Annette Guest, Wardell Piper and Malanie McSears in a group called the Debonettes. The radio personality Georgie Woods introduced them to Harris, a guitarist from the rhythm section that powered much of the Philadelphia sound. After McSears married and left, the trio recorded as First Choice. Their 1972 debut, This Is the House (Where Love Died), got local airplay but missed nationally. In 1973 Armed and Extremely Dangerous, written by Harris and Allan Felder, reached No.28 on the Hot 100 and No.11 on the R&B chart.

When Harris launched Gold Mind as an imprint of New York’s Salsoul Records, he brought First Choice with him. By then the trio was Fleming, Guest and Ursula Herring. Harris wrote Doctor Love with Felder and Ron Tyson, a Philadelphia singer and songwriter who later joined the Temptations. Harris also arranged and produced it at Sigma Sound Studios. Tom Moulton mixed the 12-inch version, stretching it past seven and a half minutes for the clubs, and that version did much of the work.

One place outside the Top 40

Gold Mind issued the single as 4004, with the ballad I Love You More Than Before on the B-side. Billboard’s charts put it at No.41 on the Hot 100, No.23 on the R&B chart and No.8 on the dance chart, and Cash Box took it to No.79 that October. The album Delusions followed that fall. One of its tracks, Let No Man Put Asunder, was not even released as a single until Salsoul issued a Shep Pettibone remix in 1983. That version became the record most people now associate with the group, and Mary J. Blige covered the song on her 1999 album Mary.

The record traveled. In the Netherlands it reached No.31 on the Dutch Top 40, and on December 3, 1977, First Choice appeared on TopPop, the weekly AVRO program that was the first regular pop show on Dutch television. Fleming, Guest and Herring stand at three microphones on a set hung with tinsel, in matching sequined halter outfits. By then the single had finished its American chart run. In Europe it was still worth a television booking.

First Choice split in 1980, and Fleming kept recording as a solo artist, including the dance single Love Itch for Prelude. On August 6, 2014, she sang with Guest, Piper and Herring again at a reunion concert at the East River Bandshell in New York. Her manager, George Iz Correia, described her as probably one of the most sampled voices in current dance music. Sister Sledge, fellow Philadelphians, paid tribute to her soulful voice, and the Christian Hope Baptist Church, which she had attended since childhood, said she always came home.

Rochelle Fleming-Finney was born on February 11, 1954, and died on November 5, 2026, in the city where she started. Doctor Love was the record that missed the Top 40 by one place. It was also the record that showed what her voice could do over a dance groove, and dance music has been borrowing that voice ever since.