Patrick Swayze – She’s Like The Wind ft. Wendy Fraser

The biggest heartthrob of the 1980s wrote his own hit ballad three years before Dirty Dancing, and two movies turned it down before one made it a classic.

Patrick Swayze wasn’t supposed to be a singer. He was a dancer first, a Broadway performer, and by 1987 the face of the year’s surprise blockbuster — but tucked inside Dirty Dancing was a secret he’d been carrying for three years. “She’s Like the Wind” wasn’t written for that film at all. Swayze and his friend, composer Stacy Widelitz, had written it back in 1984 for a different movie entirely, and it had been rejected, shelved, and rejected again before it finally found the one film that would make it a standard.

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The song began life for Grandview, U.S.A., a 1984 film in which Swayze co-starred with Jamie Lee Curtis. He had an idea for a ballad but couldn’t finish it, so he called Widelitz to help him shape it, and the two completed “She’s Like the Wind” and cut a demo — with Widelitz’s girlfriend, a Hunter College music student named Wendy Fraser, singing the female harmony. The Grandview producers passed. Two years later, when Swayze took a role in the hockey film Youngblood alongside Rob Lowe, he shopped the song again. Rejected once more. The demo sat in a drawer.

Then came Dirty Dancing. During production Swayze played the old demo for producer Linda Gottlieb and director Emile Ardolino, and this time the answer was yes. The soundtrack’s executive producers signed off, and in November 1986 the song was re-recorded with Michael Lloyd producing, Fraser brought back to reprise the harmony she’d sung on the demo years earlier. Swayze based the lyric on his wife, Lisa Niemi — a love he described as powerful and grounding and just slightly out of reach, which is exactly what the central image of a woman moving through his life like wind through a tree is reaching for. In the film, the song plays under a quiet, aching scene between Johnny and Baby. Swayze never sings it on screen. His voice simply carries the moment.

A one-hit wonder who happened to be a movie star

Released in December 1987 as the third single from the soundtrack, after Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’ chart-topping “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” and Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes,” the song reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1988 and spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. It went Top 10 across Canada, Ireland, Belgium, and France, and helped push the Dirty Dancing soundtrack past thirty million copies worldwide, one of the best-selling film soundtracks ever made. It was the only pop hit Swayze ever had, which made him one of the more unlikely one-hit wonders in chart history — a bona fide movie star who wandered onto the singles chart and stayed just long enough to leave a standard behind.

Remembering Patrick Swayze

Patrick Wayne Swayze was born in Houston on August 18, 1952, the son of a choreographer who put him in dance class almost before he could walk. He trained in ballet, danced on Broadway, played Danny Zuko in Grease, and turned a low-budget dance picture into a cultural phenomenon, following it with Ghost, Point Break, and a run of roles that made him one of the most recognizable stars of his era. People named him Sexiest Man Alive in 1991; he took his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1997. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early 2008, he kept working almost to the end and died on September 14, 2009, at 57. Stacy Widelitz, the friend who helped him finish this song, died in 2025. What the two of them built in 1984 for a film that didn’t want it has long outlived them both — a tender, unlikely ballad from a man the world knew for everything but his voice. Remembering him on his birthday.