A theme song for a show that changed its mind
Every duet has a meeting point, but Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand never actually met over You Don’t Bring Me Flowers — not at first. The song began life as a piece of television work music. In 1977, Diamond was writing with Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the Oscar-winning husband-and-wife lyricists, and together they composed a short theme for All That Glitters, a daily sitcom created by Norman Lear, the most powerful producer in American television. The song was designed to run just 45 seconds under the opening credits — two lovers who have drifted apart, still going through the motions of a shared life, summed up in one withering observation: you don’t bring me flowers anymore.
Then Lear changed the concept of the show, and the song no longer fit. A lesser piece of work would have gone into a drawer. Instead, Diamond expanded the track from 45 seconds to over three minutes, adding instrumental sections and an additional verse, and recorded it as a solo performance for his 1977 album I’m Glad You’re Here with Me Tonight. It sat there, quietly excellent — a miniature about the death of romance inside a marriage that is still technically alive.
Early in 1978, Barbra Streisand recorded her own solo version for her album Songbird. Two of the biggest stars in American music now had the same melancholy song in their catalogues, sung from opposite sides of the same empty kitchen table. Neither of them had any plan to sing it together. Radio had other ideas.
The divorce present heard around the world
The official duet exists because a disc jockey’s marriage ended. Gary Guthrie was the program director at WAKY in Louisville, Kentucky, and as he went through a divorce from his wife Becky, he made her an extraordinary going-away present: he took Diamond’s solo recording and Streisand’s solo recording and spliced them together, editing the two performances into a seamless duet — two strangers in separate studios, answering each other line by line. Guthrie’s version first aired on WAKY on May 24, 1978, and listeners went wild for it.
He was not the only one with the idea. Nor was it Guthrie’s first experiment of the kind: as program director at KTFM in San Antonio he had previously spliced together verses from the English and Spanish versions of Captain & Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together, and done the same with America’s Sister Golden Hair, looking for sounds that would make his stations stand out. In Chicago, WGN personality Roy Leonard and producer Peter Marino prepared their own version, placing Streisand’s album on one turntable and Diamond’s on another and mixing them live, in a single take, with no edits — Streisand singing first, Diamond answering — and the WGN version became so beloved that listeners were still requesting it years after an official duet existed. In Detroit, Jack Hood and Gene Kruszewski of WJR created yet another spliced duet that became a local and regional hit. The story triggered a worldwide media buzz, covered from Good Morning America and People magazine to the BBC.
The practical problem was glaring: America was clamouring for a record it could not buy. On July 27, Guthrie sent his spliced version to CBS, and by August 3 both Streisand and Diamond had agreed to release a duet. But rather than license any of the homemade edits, Columbia Records brought the two stars into an actual studio together.
One studio, two superstars, a number one
The official duet was recorded at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, produced by Bob Gaudio — formerly of the Four Seasons, and by then Diamond’s trusted studio collaborator — and released on October 17, 1978. What the radio edits had only simulated, the real performance perfected: Diamond’s grainy baritone and Streisand’s crystalline precision circling the same lyric, two people singing past each other in a song about exactly that failure to connect. Record World judged that “the song is perfect for both vocalists”.
The single reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for two non-consecutive weeks in December 1978 — it first topped the chart dated December 2 — and it was the third number-one hit of each singer’s career. It sold over a million copies and was certified platinum in the United States, reached No. 1 in Canada on both the Top Singles and Adult Contemporary charts, No. 5 in the United Kingdom and No. 3 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. It was certified gold in the United Kingdom for half a million copies and platinum in Australia, and it finished 1979 at No. 21 on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 — an unusually high placing for a ballad that had already peaked the previous December. Even the B-side told the story of the song’s ubiquity: it carried not another Diamond or Streisand performance but an instrumental version of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers itself, as if Columbia knew the melody was the third star of the record. A country version by Jim Ed Brown and Helen Cornelius, released at the same time, reached No. 10 on the Hot Country Singles chart in early 1979 — a measure of how completely the song had saturated the culture.
There was an epilogue in the courts. In 1979 Guthrie sued CBS for five million dollars, claiming he had been improperly compensated for his role in creating the hit. The case was settled out of court, and the acknowledgements flowed in the end: CBS gave Guthrie a gold record plaque, Diamond sent him flowers — naturally — and Streisand sent a telegram. Columbia also presented gold records to Leonard and Marino for the WGN version and to Hood and Kruszewski for the WJR version, an almost unheard-of official thank-you to radio men for what was, in effect, a bootleg.
Part of the song’s power is that its lyric was built for two voices all along, even though nobody noticed at first. Diamond wrote the music and shared the words with the Bergmans, and the lyric they shaped is a small masterpiece of domestic erosion: the lovers still share a house and a routine, still “go through the motions” of the life they built, but the gestures that once proved love — flowers, songs sung at the door — have quietly stopped. It is not a song about a break-up; it is a song about the long silence before one. When Diamond stretched the discarded television theme into a full recording, adding instrumental passages and another verse, he gave that silence room to breathe. Sung solo, it is one person noticing the flowers are missing. Sung as a duet, it becomes something sadder and truer: two people noticing it at the same time, in the same room, and saying so to each other. That is why the spliced radio versions felt so inevitable. The song had been a conversation waiting for its second voice since the day it was written.
The Grammy moment and the film that never was
For more than a year after the single topped the charts, Diamond and Streisand had still never performed the song live together. That changed on February 27, 1980, when they closed the Grammy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles with a surprise performance that has since become a piece of television folklore; it was later released on the album Grammy’s Greatest Moments Volume I. Recalling the broadcast on the 2007 CBS special My Night at the Grammys, Alicia Keys said it “might very well have been the first Grammy moment”, describing the lights dimming and Barbra and Neil taking the stage to sing “one of the classic television duets of all time”.
Hollywood nearly extended the story further. Diamond and Streisand planned to star together in a motion picture built around the song, but the project was cancelled when Diamond instead committed to his remake of The Jazz Singer, released in 1980. The duet would have to remain a three-minute film of its own.
Legacy: the audience as arranger
You Don’t Bring Me Flowers endures, first of all, as one of the definitive adult-contemporary ballads — the title track of a Diamond album, a fixture of Streisand’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2, and a song whose plainspoken lyric has made it the definitive anthem of romance quietly expiring. But its deeper legacy is the way it was made. Long before mashups became an internet art form, before fan edits and algorithmic collaborations, three radio stations in three cities independently reached the same conclusion: these two records belonged together. The audience, through its proxies at the mixing desk, effectively arranged a collaboration between two superstars who had never discussed it, and the industry was wise enough to follow the listeners’ lead.
It is fitting that the man who started it received flowers from the singer. The song began as 45 seconds of discarded television music, and became a million-selling number one because a divorcing DJ in Kentucky understood something the record business had missed. Sometimes the people know how the story should end — you just have to splice it together for them.