Levi Stubbs' Tears song in 1990. In 2014, "NME" ranked it at number 207 in their list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. All tracks composed by Billy Bragg; except where indicated Levi Stubbs' Tears "Levi Stubbs' Tears" is a song by Billy Bragg. It was the first single released from Bragg's 1986 album "Talking with the Taxman about Poetry". The song's title refers to The Four Tops lead singer Levi Stubbs, whose music remains a source of comfort to the protagonist through years of abandonment, injury, and domestic violence. A guitar riff from the song was sampled by Norman Cook
George Stubbs included a large segment on Stubbs. In 1959 Mellon and Taylor first met and bonded over their appreciation of Stubbs. This led Mellon to create the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art (The predecessor of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) with Taylor as the director. Mellon eventually amassed the largest collection of Stubbs paintings in the world which would become a part of his larger collection of British art that would become the Yale Center for British Art. In 1971, Taylor published the seminal catalogue, "Stubbs". The record price for a Stubbs painting was set by