1975 · Behind the Songs
A live medley that stitched a movie ballad to a Broadway reverie — and gave nostalgia a backbeat.
In the mid-1970s, Gladys Knight & the Pips stood at the peak of their commercial powers. “Midnight Train to Georgia” had carried them to the top of the charts and into the Grammy winner’s circle, and the group was looking for ways to stretch beyond the conventional three-minute single. The answer they found was a medley — not a medley of their own hits, but a daring combination of two other writers’ songs about memory itself. “The Way We Were,” Barbra Streisand’s Academy Award-winning film ballad, was joined to “Try to Remember,” the wistful opening number from the long-running stage musical The Fantasticks. Performed live and captured on the 1974 album I Feel a Song, the medley was released as a single in March 1975 and became one of the group’s most elegant chart successes.
The pairing was inspired because both songs look backward, yet they come from entirely different worlds. “The Way We Were,” with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman, was written for the 1973 Sydney Pollack film starring Streisand and Robert Redford, and it arrived as a contemporary pop standard almost overnight. “Try to Remember,” with lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt, dated to 1960 and the off-Broadway premiere of The Fantasticks, a small-scale show that would grow into the world’s longest-running musical. One song mourns a love that survives only in recollection; the other gently invites the listener to revisit a softer, earlier season of life. Sewn together, they suggest that memory itself belongs to no single genre.
What makes the Gladys Knight & the Pips version distinctive is that it was cut live. Rather than assembling the medley piece by piece in the studio, the group performed it in front of an audience with a full orchestra, and producer Ralph Moss captured the performance for I Feel a Song, the group’s 1974 Buddah Records album. You can hear the room in the recording — the slight swell of applause, the breathing space around the vocal, the sense that four singers and a large ensemble are listening to one another in real time. In an era when studio perfection was becoming the norm, the decision to go live gave the record a warmth and spontaneity that a more polished session might have smoothed away.
From album track to single
Buddah Records issued the medley as a seven-inch single on March 14, 1975, with “Try to Remember” listed as the A-side and “The Need to Be” and “Love Finds Its Own Way” on the flip. The record, which runs just under five minutes, climbed to number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent seventeen weeks on the chart. It performed even better with adult-contemporary listeners, reaching number 2, and it crossed the Atlantic with unusual force: in the United Kingdom it peaked at number 4, outperforming Streisand’s own original, which had stopped at number 31 there. The single also reached number 29 in Canada and number 3 on Canada’s adult-contemporary chart, and it earned a Silver certification from the British Phonographic Industry.
Those numbers tell a story about timing. By 1975, the group had spent more than a decade refining a sound that could move between soul, pop, and easy listening without losing its center, and the medley let each of those audiences hear something familiar. Pop buyers recognized “The Way We Were.” Theatergoers recognized “Try to Remember.” Soul listeners recognized the unmistakable grain of Gladys Knight’s voice and the pillowy support of the Pips — Bubba Knight, William Guest, and Edward Patten — whose harmonies wrap around the lead vocal like a well-worn coat. The record did not need a novelty hook; its novelty was its good taste.
A Grammy nomination and a spoken prophecy
The recording earned the group a nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus at the 1975 Grammy Awards. It did not win, but the nomination itself was significant: it placed a soul group in a pop category on the strength of an interpretive performance, a reminder that Knight’s instrument could carry any material. The group had already won Grammys for “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “Neither One of Us,” so the nomination extended a run of peer recognition that few vocal groups of the era could match.
Listeners who know the album version will remember how it begins. Before the singing starts, Knight speaks directly to the audience, musing that the year then unfolding — 1974 — would one day be looked back on as “the good old days.” It is a small, almost throwaway moment, but it frames everything that follows. The medley is not just about the past described in the lyrics; it is about the present moment becoming the past even as you live it. Critics noticed. Writing years later, AllMusic’s Alex Henderson observed that Knight’s spoken prediction had come true, and the Virginian-Pilot’s Rashod Ollison praised the track as a stirring remake buoyed by its live orchestra.
What to listen for
Play the record with attention and several details reward you. First, notice the handoff between the two songs: the group does not simply stop one and start the other, but lets the mood of “The Way We Were” dissolve into the gentler waltz-time lilt of “Try to Remember,” as if the singer has drifted from one memory into an older one. Second, listen to the Pips. Their backgrounds are never merely decorative; they answer Knight’s phrases, cushion her sustained notes, and at key moments step forward with the kind of close harmony that only years of singing together can produce. Third, catch the orchestra. The strings do not overwhelm the voices — they rise and recede like light through curtains, a reminder that this was recorded with everyone in the same room.
A second life in hip-hop and beyond
The medley’s afterlife has been unexpectedly long. In 1993, the Wu-Tang Clan sampled the recording for “Can It Be All So Simple,” a centerpiece of their landmark debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). The sample introduced Knight’s voice to a generation that had not been born when the single charted, and it demonstrated how durable the track’s atmosphere was: lifted from its orchestral setting and placed against a stark hip-hop beat, the vocal still sounded urgent. In 1983, the medley was reissued in the United Kingdom as a single backed with “Midnight Train to Georgia,” a pairing that summed up the group’s range in under ten minutes of vinyl.