Stevie Wonder Soundtrack Mystery....!

Cafe Society
1

For me, JUNGLE FEVER was one of the best films I ever saw back in the early ‘90s, as I’ve come to expect from Spike Lee. The songs by the great Stevie Wonder were the icing on the cake.

However, I was rather (unpleasantly) surprised when I bought his CD and discovered he had left off the powerful Feeding Off The Love Of The Land track which plays over the film’s end credits. Why was this? It was an unfortunate omission to make because, after everything you saw with the film, it summed it all up very powerfully. So why did Stevie leave it off?

Help me!

2

“Feeding Off the Love of the Land” first appeared on the compilation album Nobody’s Child (a benefit album for Romanian orphans).

That means the publisher/album label probably had rights to the song. Paying a fee to use a song in a movie was probably within the means of the JF budget, but the amount necessary to include the song in the album (presumably from a competing label) was probably prohibitive, and seen as unnecessary given how much other original Stevie material was available for that release.