A Song For You

Driving to work Friday morning, I heard Carmen McRae singing "A Song For You" and I was mesmerized. It was 6:30, I was just turning onto Ashland from 47th, and there was a ferris wheel in the middle of the road that must have been three stories tall. Turns out one of Chicago's many street festivals was about to begin.

Just like the scene outside my car window that morning, this song is eerily beautiful. It's narrated by a famous singer who has spent a lifetime singing to audiences around the world. This time, the narrator is singing to her partner. The thing is, it's from the perspective of after the singer has died. She says, of all the songs she has ever sung, when her life is over, the one performance she'll remember is when she was singing to her lover, just the two of them alone in a room.

This song has also been done by Donnie Hathaway, Ray Charles, and Whitney Houston. It's one of those tunes that has become part of a modern jazz songbook. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that it was written by none other than Leon Russell in 1971.