Rita Coolidge – (Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher And Higher

She Asked Her Brother-in-Law If She Could Have the Shelved Arrangement — and It Became Her First Hit in Nine Years

The arrangement that gave Rita Coolidge her first major hit was already finished before she ever sang it as a lead. Booker T. Jones — her brother-in-law, married to her sister Priscilla — had built a reading of Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” for an album of his own that ultimately never saw release. Coolidge and Priscilla had been in the studio singing background on the original session. When the project was shelved, Coolidge asked Booker if she could have the chart. The recording that resulted, pulled back from Wilson’s stomping 1967 tempo into something more spacious and confident, would carry her to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1977 and earn her a gold record after nine years of trying.

The path to that decision began with a rejection. In 1976, Coolidge and producer David Anderle delivered a finished album to A&M Records called Southern Lady. A&M president Jerry Moss listened, then asked them to keep working. He was not killing the record so much as reshaping it. Coolidge later told the New York Times that Moss reckoned the existing album would automatically move 150,000 copies, but he wanted to push harder for AM radio play. Half of Southern Lady was retained, five new tracks were cut, and the resulting record became Anytime…Anywhere. Among Coolidge’s additions was the Booker T. Jones arrangement her brother-in-law had set aside.

From Background Vocal to Lead

Sessions for the new material ran across Sunset Sound, A&M Studios, and Studio 55 in Los Angeles. Jones returned to the chart he had originally written, this time playing organ, contributing the string arrangement, and adding synthesizers. Mike Baird drummed; Leland Sklar played bass; Jerry McGee and Dean Parks handled guitars; Michael Utley sat at the electric piano. Kim Carnes and Danny Timms sang behind Coolidge. The tempo had been pulled back from Wilson’s Detroit-fueled original — and the famous chorus was largely dropped, returning only as background voices layered beneath a repeat of the first verse at the end. It was a confident structural decision, the kind a singer makes only when she trusts what is left after the obvious hook is removed.

(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher went to radio in March 1977 and built across the spring. By September 10 it had peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100, held from the top spot by The Emotions’ “Best of My Love.” Cash Box did move it to No. 1, and so did the Canadian RPM chart. The single sold a million copies in the United States and earned Coolidge her first RIAA gold record. Anytime…Anywhere reached No. 6 on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum, eventually generating two more Top 20 hits: a cover of Boz Scaggs’s “We’re All Alone” at No. 7 and a reading of the Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do” at No. 20. Coolidge had been signed to A&M since 1971 with five solo albums behind her. None had broken her commercially the way this one did.

The Hit That Arrived at the Worst Possible Time

The success landed against a backdrop she did not discuss publicly at the time. Coolidge had miscarried earlier in 1977, and her marriage to Kris Kristofferson — never easy, and later detailed in her 2016 memoir Delta Lady as both volatile and emotionally corrosive — was beginning to unravel. Years later she described the period plainly: she had lost a child, and the album seemed to come at a moment when she needed a lift. She did not see it coming. The song’s title, taken intact from a 1960s soul record about romantic devotion, took on a different cast in her telling — less about a lover, more about whatever keeps a person upright when the floor goes out from beneath them.

The record’s afterlife has been long. It became a staple of soft-rock playlists and oldies formats through the 1980s and 1990s, surfaced in films and television wherever a producer needed a recognizable late-seventies ballad, and remained a fixture in Coolidge’s live set across the decades — including a noted acoustic re-recording with pianist Jim Brickman. Critics have argued for and against the arrangement ever since. Some hear it as a soft-rock dilution of Wilson’s powerhouse original; others praise it as a reinterpretation that opened space inside the song the up-tempo reading never had time for. Both camps concede the same thing: the record worked. After almost a decade of recording, Rita Coolidge finally had a hit that would not go away.