Some months of the year get immortalized in song lyrics and titles far more frequently than others, and September happens to be one of them. I’m basing this assertion on a nonscientific Google search as well as lyrics that popped into my head when thinking about the month that bids goodbye to summer.
September songs span multiple genres, from R&B to funk to rock to jazz and even show tunes. Join me in a celebration of the first month of autumn and the music it has inspired.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 225 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Let’s open with a classic tune by Earth, Wind & Fire. I’m sure most of you can guess what it is, but first, some background on the group. From their website:
During the 1970s, a new brand of pop music was born – one that was steeped in African and African-American styles – particularly jazz and R&B but appealed to a broader cross-section of the listening public. As founder and leader of the band Earth, Wind & Fire, Maurice White not only embraced but also helped bring about this evolution of pop, which bridged the gap that has often separated the musical tastes of black and white America. It certainly was successful, as EWF combined high-caliber musicianship, wide-ranging musical genre eclecticism, and ’70s multicultural spiritualism. “I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before,” Maurice explains. “Although we were basically jazz musicians, we played soul, funk, gospel, blues, jazz, rock and dance music…which somehow ended up becoming pop. We were coming out of a decade of experimentation, mind expansion and cosmic awareness. I wanted our music to convey messages of universal love and harmony without force-feeding listeners’ spiritual content.” […] In 1969, Maurice joined two friends in Chicago, Wade Flemons and Don Whitehead, as a songwriting team composing songs and commercials in the Chicago area. The three friends got a recording contract with Capitol and called themselves the “Salty Peppers,” and had a marginal hit in the Mid-western area called “La La Time.” That band featured Maurice on vocals, percussion and Kalimba along with keyboardists/vocalists Wade Flemons and Don Whitehead.
After relocating to Los Angeles and signing a new contract with Warner Bros., Maurice simultaneously made what may have been the smartest move of his young career. He changed the band’s name to Earth, Wind & Fire (after the three elements in his astrological chart). The new name also captured Maurice’s spiritual approach to music – one that transcended categories and appealed to multiple artistic principals, including composition, musicianship, production, and performance. In addition to White, Flemons and Whitehead, Maurice recruited Michael Beal on guitar, Leslie Drayton, Chester Washington and Alex Thomas on horns, Sherry Scott on vocals, percussionist Phillard Williams and his younger brother Verdine on bass.
The group went on to become a global phenomenon.
So, if you guessed their hit tune “September,” you win. With over 752 million YouTube views to date and millions of global streams, their song is here to stay.
This story by NPR’s Dan Charnas provides some background on its creation:
The song that never ends: Why Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘September’ sustains
The story of the song begins in 1978. Allee Willis was a struggling songwriter in LA — until the night she got a call from Maurice White, the leader of Earth, Wind & Fire. White offered her the chance of a lifetime: to co-write the band’s next album. Willis arrived at the studio the next day hoping it wasn’t some kind of cosmic joke.
“As I open the door, they had just written the intro to ‘September.’ And I just thought, ‘Dear God, let this be what they want me to write!’ Cause it was obviously the happiest-sounding song in the world,” Willis says.
Using a progression composed by Earth, Wind & Fire guitarist Al McKay, White and Willis wrote the song over the course of a month, conjuring images of clear skies and dancing under the stars. Willis says she likes songs that tell stories, and that at a certain point, she feared the lyrics to “September” were starting to sound simplistic. One nonsense phrase bugged her in particular.
“The, kind of, go-to phrase that Maurice used in every song he wrote was ‘ba-dee-ya,’ ” she says. “So right from the beginning he was singing, ‘Ba-dee-ya, say, do you remember / Ba-dee-ya, dancing in September.’ And I said, ‘We are going to change ‘ba-dee-ya’ to real words, right?’ “
Wrong. Willis says that at the final vocal session she got desperate and begged White to rewrite the part.
“And finally, when it was so obvious that he was not going to do it, I just said, ‘What the f*** does ‘ba-dee-ya’ mean?’ And he essentially said, ‘Who the f*** cares?'” she says. “I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove.”
Less well known is a tune titled “It’s September,” by the great Stax artist Johnnie Taylor:
Known as “The Philosopher of Soul,” Johnnie Taylor (1934–2000) was a versatile and charismatic singer, who combined the sweetness of gospel with the grittiness of blues. In the ’60s and ’70s, the prolific artist delivered hit after hit—including the first-ever platinum-certified single—and was instrumental in revitalizing Stax when it became an independent entity.
Born just outside of Memphis, in Crawfordsville, AR, Taylor began singing in church as a child, graduating to gospel groups as a teenager. With his smooth vocals, Taylor rose quickly, performing in the ’50s with such legendary groups as the Highway QCs and The Soul Stirrers—the latter of which found him replacing his friend Sam Cooke on lead vocals.
[…]When it came to his music, Taylor worked regularly with several of the in-house writers at the label, including Bettye Crutcher, Homer Banks, and Raymond Jackson (who together made up the “We Three” songwriting team). Taylor also formed a particularly fruitful creative partnership with the Detroit-based producer and songwriter, Don Davis, who joined Stax in the late ’60s. Beginning with “Who’s Making Love,” which Davis produced, the two men worked on a string of successful singles, including the Top 10 R&B hits “Take Care of Your Homework” and “Testify (I Wanna).” In the early ’70s, they topped the R&B charts with “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone” (1970) and “I Believe in You (You Believe in Me)” (1973)
Here’s a live performance of “It’s September,” which he recorded for Stax in 1974.
Moving into the jazz genre, “September in the Rain” has become a jazz standard, even though it took many decades to happen. The story behind its inception is told at Cafe Songbook, which describes its creation for the 1930’s film “Stars Over Broadway.” It was years later that it became a jazz standard recorded by multiple artists. Here are three versions from Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and Nat “King” Cole.
A show tune from a long-running hit came to my mind when thinking about song lyrics referencing September: the lovely opening ballad in the off-Broadway, award-winning show “The Fantasticks,” which opened in New York City in 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse.
I can’t begin to count the number of times I saw it there. Whenever my parents had visitors in from out of town, they took them to see it and I got to go, too. I adopted the same tradition with out-of-town friends. It has played all across the country and around the globe over the years, and I can still sing every word of “Try to Remember”:
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh
so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember and if you remember
then follow
follow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
When no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
When dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
When love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember
then follow
follow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember
Without a hurt the heart will hollow.
Deep in December
it’s nice to remember
The fire of September that made you mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember and follow
follow.
There are so many wonderful versions that it’s hard to pick just one. But here’s one of my favorites, sung by Harry Belafonte:
Black American tenors Rodrick Dixon, Victor Trent Cook, and Thomas Young were known as “Three Mo’ Tenors.” Opera fans will enjoy Young and Cook’s mashup of “Try to Remember” with “Not While I’m Around” from Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sweeney Todd”:
Ivan Lins was born in Rio de Janeiro, on June 16th, 1945. He is a complete musician and great songwriter, known for many Grammy Awards and Latin Grammy Awards he received, by numerous recordings of his work worldwide, differentiated by their harmonies and its arrangement at the same time refined and popular. Not coincidentally, he is the most recorded Brazilian artist living abroad. Autodidact, he began playing piano at eighteen years old and was very influenced by the music he heard in his childhood in the United States, as well as by jazz and bossa nova, this genre that made him abandon the volleyball courts, sport practiced with passion, to devote to music. For this reason, gave up the career of Chemical Industrial, course completed in 1969 with pos graduate in 1970.
At this time, Lins has already showed a differentiated harmonic construction in his songs, unusual in Brazilian music, and one of the characteristics that would make Ivan Lins became so respected among musicians worldwide.
Here are the lyrics with English translation.
Quincy Jones covered it in 1989 (subtitled “Brazilian Wedding Song”) with Sarah Vaughan, Take 6, and Herbie Hancock, featuring Gerald Albright, George Benson, and George Duke.
While scrolling through YouTube I came across a 1992 cover version of Quincy’s cover, by The Isley Brothers. I hadn’t heard it before (and I’m a huge fan), so I’ll close with it:
If you have a September wedding or anniversary celebration planned, you may just want to add one of these three to your playlist! See you in the comments section below with more, and be sure to post your favorite September tunes.
