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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin'

album by Stephanie Mills

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ7991013 ↗
Source-derived summary

What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin' is the third album by Stephanie Mills. It was released in 1979 and produced by James Mtume and Reggie Lucas.

Critical reception

The Bay State Banner wrote: "There are the usual gospel roots to Mills's intense mannerism, and there are many instances of additional studio distortion—listen to her electric squawk in 'Put Your Body In It'—but the safe licks her band plays give us something familiar to hang on to while Mills camps it up."

Track listing

All songs written by James Mtume and Reggie Lucas except where indicated.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin'” is album by Stephanie Mills. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through What, Gonna and Lovin', not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1979—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1979. For this dossier, What, Gonna and Lovin' is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “album by Stephanie Mills” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7991013. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin'”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin' primary sources, What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin' archive and What research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin'”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin'” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.