Earth, Wind & Fire – September

The 21st means nothing. It just sang better than every other date they tried.

Every year on September 21 a large portion of the internet marks a date that was chosen because of how it scanned. Allee Willis, who wrote the words with Maurice White, spent decades correcting people about this and never quite managed it. They had worked through the whole month — the first, the second, the third, on down — singing each one against the melody to hear which sat best. The twenty-first won. There is no anniversary behind it, no birthday, no wedding, nothing. It simply sounded right.

Keep watching: Earth, Wind & Fire – Let’s Groove

Willis was a struggling songwriter in Los Angeles in 1978 when the phone rang and the voice on the other end said it was Maurice White and he wanted her to write the next Earth, Wind & Fire album. She had loved the band for years. On her first day at the studio she opened the door and walked into a guitar figure already playing in the room, and that was the moment she understood what the job was going to be.

The figure belonged to Al McKay, and by his account it had arrived without effort. He came downstairs one morning in early summer feeling good, went into his home studio, set up a groove, and let it assemble itself piece by piece. He brought it to White, who liked it immediately and asked to hear it again. And again. On the last pass White looked up and sang the opening line over the top of it. Willis and White then spent about a month building the rest around McKay’s progression, in A major, working toward clear skies and dancing and the general sensation of a good night remembered later.

The words that were never meant to stay

One phrase bothered Willis throughout. White’s habit, in every song he wrote, was to sing a nonsense syllable as a placeholder while the melody took shape, and his default was ba-dee-ya. So from the first run-through he was singing it into the front of the chorus, and Willis assumed — reasonably, as anyone would — that real words would replace it before anyone committed the vocal.

They did not. At the final vocal session she pressed him on it directly, and White declined to change a syllable of it. Willis later described this as the most valuable thing she learned about songwriting from anybody: never let the lyric get in the way of the groove. The placeholder is now one of the most widely sung phrases in popular music, and it means precisely what it looks like it means.

ARC and Columbia released it on November 18, 1978. A song called September, put out in November, on a greatest-hits compilation rather than a studio album — The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire, Vol. 1 — which is not usually where a band’s defining record turns up. It went to No. 1 on the R&B chart, No. 8 on the Hot 100, and No. 3 in Britain.

The song that wouldn’t die

Those numbers make it a solid hit rather than the biggest thing they ever did. Judged by anything else, it has comprehensively outlasted every record that outperformed it. It goes into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2018. Los Angeles named September 21 after the band. In Britain the streaming figures climb every weekend, reliably, the way a tide does, and in 2017 it was the most-streamed record of the entire 1970s in that country — a decade that includes a great deal of competition.

Willis, who called it the song that wouldn’t die, watched it keep coming back for forty years and kept fielding the same question about the date. Maurice White died in 2016, Willis in 2019, and neither lived to see the point at which the answer stopped mattering to anybody. People do not really want the significance. They want the twenty-first to come round again so they can play it.

Which is roughly what White was arguing for at that final vocal session. The syllable means nothing, the date means nothing, and the record has outlived almost everything from its year that meant something.