"Don't Stop My Party"
Arthur Foy ("Don't Stop My Party" Redux)
Composed by Arthur Foy & Carl Marshall
April 25, 2025:
New southern soul fans may wonder why Arthur Foy, a relatively marginal and lesser-known musician even in his turn-of-the-century salad days, deserves discussion twenty years later, in 2025. Frankly, the reason is his continuing interest to fans and collectors searching for his out-of-print single, "Don't Stop My Party," as reported in Daddy B. Nice's Mailbag over the last couple of months. (Scroll down for a transcription.) Over time, the Mailbag successfully linked someone looking for a pristine copy of "Don't Stop My Party with someone possessing a pristine copy of "Don't Stop My Party" (DJ Haynes). But lost in that process (an omission I'm trying to correct here) is the fact that a single, lingering cache of the now out-of-print album containing "Don't Stop My Party" does exist at one location on the Internet, and it's not an obscure one: Amazon.
The album is I Like Kissing On You and the fact that "Don't Stop My Party" is on the album's track list can be verified at All Music, another site that does not sell it but does compile data on it and other albums. This will assure fans who may flinch at the hefty $33.85 price tag on Amazon that "Don't Stop My Party" is in fact included in I LIKE KISSING ON YOU. Here is the link to buy it.
Buy Arthur Foy's album I LIKE KISSING ON YOU containing the single "Don't Stop My Party" at Amazon.
4-25-25: From Daddy B. Nice's Mailbag...The latest Mailbag request for Arthur Foy's "Don't Stop My Party"
REDUX: ARTHUR FOY REQUEST & REPLIES:
Arthur foy don’t stop my party
Dear Daddy B Nice,
This is DJ Noah. A while back I asked for a digital copy of Arthur Foy’s “Don’t Stop My Party”. I know you gave me some radio recordings of the song but do you think you can record/rip it from the CD if you have it? I want to play this song on the student run radio. Director prefers wav and flac files but a high quality MP3 will do just fine.
Thanks,
DJ Noah
Arthur Foy
Hi DabbyBNice, enjoy your monthly newsletter.
I was reading one of your articles and saw you
were looking for a song by Arthur Foy. Don't Stop My Party.
Did you ever find it?
DjKrip
Arthur Foy Track
Daddy B. Nice
I saw where you had a viewer asking for “Don’t Stop My Party” in wav - I have it and can send it to the person what was looking for it. If you send me their email I will be glad to do it, DJ Noah I think was his name.
Thank you for what you do!! One Day I hope to get “DJ Haynes” included on the
Comprehensive Index!! Haha
DJ Haynes
Daddy B. Nice replies:
That's so accommodating of you DJ Haynes. Good for you! As for the
Comprehensive Index, don't laugh. You should be in it. Truth is, I've never been as far behind with the Comp Index as I am now. And I'm just talking about keeping up with the monthly
Top 10 Singles and
End of Year Awards, where I'm (yikes!) like a year behind. Not including any citations in the Artist Guides or the
Corner's Top 40 Singles or "News & Notes," which I gave up trying to comp-index years ago. Big dreams, slow execution, my man. I'll send you that DJ Noah email!
Read Daddy B. Nice's Artist Guide to Arthur Foy.
DJ Krip replies:
Thanks for the reply 'DBN' I misread it. I have a copy thought you were looking for.
Keep up the good work ,thanks for those monthly
top ten posting.
djKrip.
**************
Comments, information or questions for Daddy B. Nice?
Write to:
daddybnice@southernsoulrnb.com
*************
Daddy B. Nice's Original Profile:
"Don't Stop My Party" is one of the greatest underground Southern Soul hits ever. Louisianan Arthur Foy hooked up with
Carl Marshall when Marshall was at his country-funkified, "I've-Lived-It-All" best, and they recorded it for
Lenny Lewis, the regionally-legendary owner of the late Suzie Q Records. (Suzie Q was the label that put
David Brinston and
O. B. Buchana, among others, on the map.)
Foy is a seventies soul singer whose rare soul 45 "Love Dreams" was listed by one auction site as having sold for $709.00 in 2009 (six bidders over a week). Coincidentally,
"Get Up And Dance," another Foy-featured, disco-era oddity originally released on 7" and subsequently as a 12" "B"-side opposite
Betty Padgett's "Sugar Daddy" on Luv N' Haight in 2010, is now on
YouTube.
However, these museum pieces of South Florida soul history aren't relevant to the Southern Soul fan and don't hold a candle to
"Don't Stop My Party," which oozes Gulf Coast southern r&b funkiness like garlic from its pores.
From Foy's lone solo album,
I Like Kissing On You (2003, now out of print), the song has made Foy something of a de facto one-hit wonder and a celebrity amongst area deejays and avid fans. Nevertheless, Arthur Foy remains unknown to the great majority of Southern Soul lovers, somewhat analogous to the situation most of the now "known" Southern Soul stars were in less than a decade ago.
The song samples available on
Amazon and
All Music Guide don't begin to do justice to the song's loping momentum or to Foy's exquisitely grainy vocal. The song cries out for exposure on YouTube and a reprint.
The song is simple in theme and modest in its goals. Here's a sampling of the lyrics:
"I just want to dance
And be fancy free,
Because time
Don't matter to me.
I just got out here
On this dance floor
With my baby.
And she's looking
So beautiful.
I want to dance with her
All night long.
Please, Mister Deejay,
Don't stop the music
Until I'm soaking wet."
Then the chorus kicks in:
"I'm not ready,
I'm not ready to go home.
I'm not ready,
I'm not ready to leave this place.
Everybody here
Is partying with you."
Then back to another simple verse:
I'm not ready to leave.
I don't want to be
Home alone.
Just like
Marvin Gaye,
I want to get it on.
Can I jingle my bell
With some of that
Carl Marshall?
Me and my baby
Want to dance.
We want to keep on dancing.
I'm not ready
To go home. . . "
I first heard
"Don't Stop My Party" on Southern Soul radio in 2005, and it really began to be played in the Deep South in 2006. At first I was unaware of the singer and knew the song only as
"I'm Not Ready (To Go Home)," the opening phrase of the chorus.
In an on-air conversation with
DJ Chico of Mobile, Alabama-based Chico's Radio in 2006, Chico asked me what song of all the Southern Soul songs available I'd like to hear. I told him I'd like to hear Arthur Foy's "I'm Not Ready," and he knew exactly what I was talking about and shared my excitement.
And in a 2009 interview with
Carl Marshall, in which among other things I pressed him to reprint his own forgotten underground classic from the same era, "I Lived It All," I asked him about the phrase Arthur Foy utters mid-way through "Don't Stop The Party": "Can I jingle your bell like Carl Marshall?"
The exchange never made the final cut for the posted interview (see
Daddy B. Nice's Artist Guide to Carl Marshall), nor did your Daddy B. Nice and Carl Marshall ever get into Marshall's arrangement and production of the number.
In fact, in spite of all the evidence within the song which might have pointed to Marshall's involvement, and despite my lengthy infatuation with the song's sound, I never put the two together--that is, never consciously associated Carl Marshall's production with the pure Southern Soul vibe emanating from the record.
Shortly after that interview with Daddy B. Nice in 2009,
Carl Marshall joined California-based CDS Records as its resident producer, beginning a prolific but wildly erratic stint producing literally dozens of albums by an across-the-board spectrum of Southern Soul artists.
Much of Marshall's output has come in for criticism here at SouthernSoulRnB as being more urban than Southern Soul, incorporating electro-funk phrasings,
Funkadelic-via-Meters
urban tempos and house music-style chants, heavy-handed, vibrato-less keyboard runs and slick, ostentatious, female background singing.
Marshall's work for CDS has, in a word, frequently been self-indulgent, slipping into "bad" funk rather than towing the fine line of singer-dominant Southern Soul.
But there have been exceptions. The uptempo tracks on the
Captain Jack Watson album were perfect for Marshall, who (despite the success of his ballad "Good Lovin' Will Make You Cry") excels with masculine-oriented, uptempo, funky tracks. And Marshall's solo albums, despite being outside the Southern Soul mainstream, have worked because Marshall does his own brand of funk best himself.
Arthur Foy's
"Don't Stop My Party" is a reminder of just how much of a genius Carl Marshall can be when he hits that perfect groove. The song has all of earmarks of Marshall's production, but they're all firmly placed within the context of the song.
The guitar hook and the guitar solos are identifiably Carl Marshall, but they don't draw attention to themselves the way they do on his more recent work. The female background singing is likewise identifiably the same in tone and register, but it has none of the overbearing and distracting slickness of the recent work. Both elements--guitar and background singing--are things of utter beauty.
To oversimplify, there's a "good" Carl Marshall and a "bad" Carl Marshall. There's "good funky" and there's "bad funky." Marshall would do well to revisit not only the incredible peaks he scales in "I Lived It All"--his masterpiece--but the pinnacle he reaches in Arthur Foy's "Don't Stop My Party."
"Don't Stop My Party" hits the heart of Southern Soul with unerring accuracy and reminds us of what Marshall can do when he's on his game, and it brings up the tremendous opportunities that might arise from Marshall moving away from the northern-funk influence and collaborating with other bayou-bleeding, Gulf-Coast writer/performers such as
Unckle Eddie.
Foy's and Marshall's
I Like Kissing On You CD doesn't contain another track even close to "Don't Stop My Party," but you can bet it will eventually be a collector's item as rare and sought-after as Foy's vintage "Love Dreams."
This is the grown-folks, dance-floor opus supreme of the Southern Soul Gulf Coast.
--Daddy B. Nice
About Arthur Foy ("Don't Stop My Party" Redux)
Arthur Foy is a Louisiana native. Foy still tours Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, most recently and prominently in the autumn of 2011 at the 20th Annual Mississippi Gulf Coast Blues and Heritage Festival on a bill with Bobby Rush, O. B. Buchana, Karen Wolfe and Nathaniel Kimble.
Song's Transcendent Moment
"I just might be here
Until the sun comes up.
Mister DJ,
Don't stop the music.
We're still dancing.
I'm not ready
To go home.
Don't try to stop my party."
If You Liked. . . You'll Love
If you liked Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally," you'll love Arthur Foy's "Don't Stop The Music."
Honorary "B" Side
"Ride My Horse"
