"Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" (The Temptations)

For years, I'd heard that The Temptations' lead singer, Dennis Edwards, had refused to sing "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" when writer/producer Norman Whitfield had first presented it to the group.  As with any rumor, it's only somewhat true.
In an October 2013 interview with the Tallahassee Democrat, Edwards told journalist Mark Hinson that he was afraid his mother eventually would hear the song's lyrics (which tell a fictitious tale of a deadbeat father) and think he was defaming his own deceased father--a respectable pastor and family man.  Said Edwards, “My father was a preacher and the complete opposite of the character in the song. My father died on the third of October and the character in the song died on the third of September.  So I knew my mother wouldn't like that either."
It's also fairly well documented that Whitfield wasn't exactly the easiest producer to work with.  In the liner notes of The Best of Marvin Gaye anthology (1995), music journalist David Ritz states that Whitfield and the usually affable Gaye almost came to blows during the sessions for "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," when the producer kept pushing the singer to sing in a register higher than he was comfortable to get a raspier vocal on the track.  Similarly, Edwards also didn't see eye-to-eye with Whitfield, who kept forcing Edwards to do take after take of his vocal on "Papa," basically stoking Whitfield's anger to get a more dramatic vocal on the track.
Edwards's final word on the subject in the interview: "Norman made me mad before I sang it, but he wanted that anger in it.  And he got it.  But I never refused to sing it.”
The song itself is deceptively simple.  The bass repeats the same three-note pattern, over and over.  The rhythm guitar scratches and wah-wah's the same chord, over and over, every few bars.  And the song never changes chords for 7 minutes (12 minutes if we're talking the album version).
However, the thrifty arrangement and instrumentation cleverly add to the tension bubbling under the track.  There's a lot of space to let things breathe and to let its atmospherics sink in.  In particular, each voice takes a solo turn telling the story over the lonely tiss-tah and thump of the hi-hat and kick drum.  But then you get jolted--not unlike the shock of finding out your absentee father was a ne'er-do-well who died and left you with nothing--by this sudden burst of syncopated handclaps, tight-as-hell harmony, atmospheric strings, and bleats of trumpet that sound like they were lifted straight off a dub reggae record.
Stylistically, the record owes a lot to what Isaac Hayes was doing at the time.  Nevertheless, nothing else that preceded or followed it ever sounded quite the same.