On April 3, 1977, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion held its breath over one small envelope.
Inside that envelope sat the winner for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards.
Barbra Streisand had already survived the hardest part of the evening simply by sitting still.
Eight years earlier, this same room had given her an Oscar for Funny Girl.
That first statuette had crowned an actress, the girl from Brooklyn who sang.
This envelope was different, because this time her name stood among the composers.
The award was only the second Oscar of her career, eight years after the first.
Beside her sat Paul Williams, the professional songwriter who had supplied the words.
Her contribution had been the melody, picked out slowly on newly learned guitar chords.
Until that film, she had been the interpreter of other people’s songs, never the author.
Songwriters were supposed to be men with pianos, publishing contracts and decades of practice.
She was a singer who had asked for guitar lessons because a film required them.
There was just one problem.
When the presenters opened the envelope, they read the title of her song aloud.
“Evergreen” had won, and the room rose for a woman who composed by ear.
With that walk to the stage, she became the first woman honored as a composer.
Between those two Oscar nights lay a decade of records, films and reinvention.
She asked if it was any good.
A Story Hollywood Kept Retelling
The song began inside a film that Hollywood had already told twice before.
A Star Is Born first reached screens in 1937, with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.
Judy Garland remade it as a musical in 1954, opposite James Mason.
Each version followed a rising young performer and the fading star she loved.
For the nineteen-seventies version, the fading world of film became the music business.
The fading man would now be a rock star sliding down the charts.
The rising woman would be a singer discovered in a small club.
Streisand’s own company, Barwood Films, developed the remake with producer Jon Peters.
She served as executive producer, a title that matched her actual authority on set.
Frank Pierson directed from a screenplay shared with John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion.
The production filmed real concerts on real stages across Arizona during 1976.
One enormous show filled Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe before the rolling cameras.
The film premiered on December 18, 1976, at a theater in Westwood.
Critics argued about the film for months, in print and on television.
Roger Ebert praised the closing shot, held unbroken while she sang her heart out.
Audiences ignored the argument and bought tickets in extraordinary numbers.
The Rock Star Who Almost Wore Another Face
The production first dreamed of Elvis Presley for the fading rock star, John Norman.
Streisand met with Presley, who reportedly liked the idea of a serious comeback role.
His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded top billing and a very substantial fee.
The talks collapsed, as Parker’s terms so often seemed designed to make them collapse.
Neil Diamond, her old Brooklyn schoolmate, was considered but buried under concert commitments.
The part finally settled on Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar turned Nashville songwriter.
Kristofferson had written “Me and Bobby McGee” and carried a genuine road-worn gravity.
He plays John Norman Howard, whose fame is collapsing while his habits worsen.
She plays Esther Hoffman, an unknown trio singer with a voice too large for bars.
Between them, the old story gained the charge of two genuine singing careers.
Marlon Brando’s name also circulated briefly through the production’s wish lists.
Kristofferson arrived with a songwriter’s reputation that matched the role’s decline perfectly.
Songs Written Before the Cameras Rolled
Unlike most musicals of its era, this film planned to perform its songs live.
The actors would sing on real stages, before real crowds, as the cameras rolled.
That decision meant every song had to exist before principal photography could begin.
Paul Williams arrived as the chief songwriter, partnered with composer Kenny Ascher.
Williams had written hits for the Carpenters and Three Dog Night with deceptive ease.
His shooting schedule demanded Kristofferson’s brooding rock songs be finished first.
So the love theme waited its turn while the crew filmed concerts and bars.
Meanwhile, in private, the film’s star was quietly solving the problem herself.
Esther Hoffman would play guitar on screen, so Streisand had begun taking lessons.
The lessons were meant as craft, a few chords convincing enough for close-ups.
Several performances were captured live in Arizona for the soundtrack album.
The Handlebar club, Sun Devil Stadium and Gammage Auditorium all hosted recording crews.
That authenticity was the point: Esther’s rise had to sound genuinely earned.
The Melody She Found While Learning
She had almost no songwriting history when those guitar lessons started in earnest.
Her only real credit was “By the Way,” written with Rupert Holmes in 1975.
By her later account, the melody arrived while she practiced those new chords.
Williams later recalled that she sat down and played him a melody on guitar.
Her fingers still stopped to check their positions between the changing chords.
The tune moved slowly, in long phrases that seemed to breathe between notes.
It sounded, even unfinished, like the calm center the stormy film desperately needed.
She finished playing and looked up with a question rather than a claim.
Williams remembered answering, “There’s your love song,” before she could doubt it further.
He asked her to put the melody on tape so he could take it home.
A singer famous for certainty had offered her tune like an apology.
The role demanded she strum convincingly through several scenes of the film.
She practiced between setups, treating the instrument like another scene to memorize.
Words Fitted to a Singer’s Tune
At home, Williams lived with the tape the way writers court a difficult poem.
He wrote the rest of the film’s songs first, because production demanded them sooner.
Only near the end of his schedule did he settle over her melody.
The lyric he built speaks of love as something gentle, settled and enduring.
He avoided declarations and fireworks, matching words to the tune’s unhurried patience.
One famous adjustment came when he showed her the song’s opening lines.
The song’s two opening images were swapped around, because it simply sang better.
The finished title borrowed its image from trees that stay green all year.
It named the song without quoting it, a promise of love that outlasts seasons.
On the album, the track sat sixth, between rock songs and reprises.
Its stillness on the record made the surrounding noise feel louder.
Recording the Theme in Hollywood
The song was recorded during 1976 at A&M Studios in Hollywood, California.
Streisand and Phil Ramone produced the soundtrack sessions together, an uncommon shared credit.
Arranger Ian Freebairn-Smith dressed her plain guitar melody in warm, unhurried orchestration.
The finished recording runs just three minutes and four seconds of sustained calm.
Within the film, the song crowns the romance between Esther and John Norman.
It arrives without strain, the one untroubled thing their love ever produces.
A gentle reprise near the finale underlines everything the couple has already lost.
She later recorded the song in Spanish, French and Italian for foreign audiences.
Those versions quietly proved how completely the melody belonged to its composer.
The soundtrack’s other songs ranged from Kristofferson’s rock to Holmes’s cabaret wit.
Against them, the love theme sounded like a held breath between arguments.
Ramone kept the production uncluttered, leaving her voice alone at the center.
A Soundtrack That Swallowed the Charts
Columbia released the soundtrack album in November 1976, ahead of the film’s premiere.
The album held number one on the Billboard 200 for six straight weeks.
It eventually earned four-times-platinum certification in the United States alone.
In Britain it topped the album chart, a first for a solo female artist.
The single followed in December 1976, with “I Believe in Love” as its flipside.
On March 5, 1977, “Evergreen” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
It stayed there three weeks, while ruling the easy listening chart for six.
In Britain the single climbed to number three, and Canada gave it number one.
Billboard later ranked the platinum single the fourth-biggest record of 1977.
The film matched it, finishing as 1976’s second-highest-grossing release in North America.
Warner Brothers had spent about six million dollars and received eighty million back.
Billboard’s all-time Hot 100 later placed the single at number 173.
The album finished 1977 as the year’s third-biggest seller in America.
The Triple Crown
Awards season began at the Golden Globes, where the film swept its nominations.
“Evergreen” took the Globe for Best Original Song, shared by its two writers.
Then came Oscar night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and the small envelope.
The Academy named “Evergreen” its Best Original Song for the year 1976.
It had beaten, among others, the theme from Rocky, that season’s other phenomenon.
No woman had ever before won that prize as a composer of the music.
Streisand also became the only woman holding Oscars for acting and for songwriting.
The Grammys completed the pattern in February 1978, nearly a year later.
There, “Evergreen” shared Song of the Year with “You Light Up My Life.”
The shared prize made Grammy history as a rare dead heat between ballads.
She also won Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, for the same recording.
Record of the Year went instead to the Eagles and “Hotel California.”
Williams would later call the Oscar, Grammy and Globe the song’s triple crown.
Oscar night arrived barely a week after the single surrendered its chart crown.
Between them, the pair had collected songwriting’s three most visible American prizes.
The Song That Refuses to Age
Other singers kept returning to the song as though it were common property.
Luther Vandross reshaped it for his 1994 album of covers, Songs.
Kenny Rogers carried his own version onto a 1996 album called Vote for Love.
In 2023, critics at The Guardian ranked it among her three greatest songs.
American Songwriter placed it fourth on a similar list the same year.
The film itself was remade again in 2018, sending new audiences back to hers.
At Hyde Park in 2019, Kristofferson joined her to sing “Lost Inside of You.”
The duet closed a circle that the 1976 film had opened for them both.
Her co-star Kris Kristofferson, the songwriter she sang beside, died in 2024.
Wedding bands adopted it so quickly that it felt older than it was.
Her own later concerts treated it as an heirloom rather than a hit.
Each remake sends listeners back to compare the leading ladies across decades.
Perhaps you first heard it at a wedding, drifting over a crowded dance floor.
Or perhaps someone older played it for you, the way families hand down weather.
A first attempt became the standard.
She asked if it was any good.
Barbra Streisand: Funny Girl
Brooklyn, 1942
Barbara Joan Streisand was born on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York.
Her father Emanuel was a respected teacher of English and literature.
Emanuel Streisand died in 1943, when his daughter was fifteen months old.
Her mother Diana supported the family working as a secretary at a school.
In 1949, her mother married Louis Kind, and home life grew strained.
The girl sang constantly, in stairwells, at weddings, anywhere an echo would answer.
She attended Erasmus Hall High School and sang in its respected choir.
She graduated at sixteen, near the top of her class, hungry for Manhattan.
Manhattan, in her plans, did not yet include singing for a living.
She studied acting, took small jobs, and slept on friends’ floors between auditions.
The father she never knew had filled his short life with books and learning.
His absence became the quiet engine that biographers keep circling in her story.
An older brother, Sheldon, completed the household in the borough’s tight streets.
The family was remembered by neighbors as bookish, musical and quietly ambitious.
The Village Clubs
In 1960, she entered a singing contest at the Lion, a Greenwich Village bar.
She won, and the bar hired her to sing for the following week.
A better room followed at the Bon Soir, where audiences came specifically to listen.
There, in 1961, a young manager named Marty Erlichman first heard her sing.
She was nineteen, unknown, and already refusing material she considered beneath her.
Erlichman became her manager, beginning a partnership that outlasted most marriages and labels.
The two of them reportedly never signed a written management contract at all.
Their entire arrangement rested on a handshake renewed across six changing decades.
Greenwich Village word of mouth carried her name to Broadway’s casting offices.
She shortened Barbara to Barbra around then, keeping the difference small and deliberate.
Club owners learned that her sets silenced rooms built for conversation and drink.
First Records, First Prizes
Broadway found her first, in I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962.
Her small comic role stopped the show nightly and earned a Tony nomination.
Columbia Records signed her in 1962, granting unusual control over her material.
The Barbra Streisand Album arrived in 1963, a debut of startling maturity.
At the Grammys, that debut won Album of the Year against heavyweight competition.
She was twenty-one, and the industry began rearranging itself around her voice.
A second album followed within months, then television specials and sold-out concerts.
Critics struggled to file a singer who treated pop standards like dramatic monologues.
She insisted on singing older standards while labels pushed current pop material.
The gamble defined her: the past, sung as if it were breaking news.
Funny Girl
In March 1964, she opened on Broadway in the musical Funny Girl.
The show told the story of Fanny Brice, a Ziegfeld comedian from another era.
Her performance of “People” gave the production a signature beyond its staging.
Her album People became her first number one on the Billboard chart.
Four years later, she carried Fanny Brice to the screen under William Wyler.
In April 1969, the Academy voted her Best Actress for that performance.
The award was shared in a famous tie with Katharine Hepburn.
She was twenty-six, with an Oscar, and still considered only a beginning.
The production eventually ran more than thirteen hundred performances on Broadway.
Omar Sharif played her leading man when the story moved to film.
The Voice Everywhere
Television had already claimed her through the 1965 special My Name Is Barbra.
That hour of television won three Emmy Awards, including one for its star.
A second special, Color Me Barbra, followed the next year to similar acclaim.
In 1967 she sang a free concert in Central Park before an enormous crowd.
Estimates of that crowd ran well past one hundred thousand listeners.
In 1969 she headlined the big-screen version of Hello, Dolly! for eager audiences.
A special Tony Award, Star of the Decade, arrived the following year.
Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony honors now all stood on the same shelf.
Records poured out steadily, some thematic, some playful, all unmistakably hers.
She recorded everything from standards to contemporary writers with identical conviction.
The Way We Were
In 1973, she starred opposite Robert Redford in the romance The Way We Were.
Its theme song came from Marvin Hamlisch and Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
Her recording of that theme became her first number one single in 1974.
The single spent three weeks at the top during that winter and spring.
The performance fixed her public image as the era’s definitive romantic balladeer.
Two years later, she was producing a love story of her own choosing.
That production, of course, was the film already chronicled in this article.
Her Oscar nomination for the role confirmed her dramatic standing beyond musicals.
The film became one of the defining big-screen romances of its decade.
Duets and the Guilty Years
Late in the decade, duets carried her voice onto unexpected radio formats.
“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” with Neil Diamond, topped the chart in 1978.
“No More Tears,” her duet with Donna Summer, repeated the feat in 1979.
In 1980, she recorded Guilty entirely alongside Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees.
Its single “Woman in Love” spent three weeks at number one that autumn.
Guilty became the best-selling album of her entire career around the world.
The Diamond duet famously began when radio producers merged their separate recordings.
Summer’s disco audience and Streisand’s ballad audience met on the same dance floor.
Taking the Camera
With Yentl in 1983, she reached for the one job men reserved for themselves.
She directed, produced, co-wrote and starred in Yentl, from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story.
No woman had previously done all four jobs on a major studio film.
Her direction won the Golden Globe, the first ever given to a woman.
In 1991, her film The Prince of Tides was nominated for Best Picture.
The actress who once begged for auditions now decided which stories got filmed.
She had become, in effect, the studio she once waited outside hoping to impress.
Yentl let her sing inside a story she had fought for years to film.
The Prince of Tides earned her a Directors Guild nomination for its direction.
Six Decades at Number One
Her album Partners gathered an all-male choir of guests in 2014.
Michael Bublé, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel and others traded verses with her.
Its most remarked track paired her with her son, singer Jason Gould.
Their duet, “How Deep Is the Ocean,” was her first studio recording with him.
The woman whose father died before she could know him sang beside her son.
Jason had already joined her onstage during her 2012 concert tour.
Partners debuted at number one, her tenth chart-topping album in America.
It made her the only artist with number one albums in six consecutive decades.
Encore repeated the trick in 2016, extending a record nobody else approaches.
Her memoir, My Name Is Barbra, arrived in 2023 to enormous attention.
Columbia calls her the best-selling female recording artist in history.
At seventy-two, she was out-charting singers a third of her age.
The Handshake and the Honors
The honors accumulated the way her albums had, decade after decade, steadily.
She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008, before an emotional audience.
President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
She married actor James Brolin in 1998, a partnership still going strong.
Through everything stood Marty Erlichman, the manager who had heard her at nineteen.
He even appears, uncredited, playing a manager inside A Star Is Born itself.
Marty Erlichman, her manager by handshake for six decades, died in 2026.
At eighty-four, she remains the standard against which singing careers are measured.
She endowed a women’s heart center at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles.
Philanthropy, like everything else in her life, she supervised in fine detail.
The voice remained; everything else, she built.
Return to that Dorothy Chandler stage, and the walk she took in 1977.
She was thirty-four, holding a prize no woman composer had ever held before.
The statuette said the industry finally counted her among its authors, not interpreters.
“Evergreen” has since played at weddings, anniversaries and slow dances beyond counting.
Its melody began as homework for a film role, assigned by nobody but herself.
Perhaps that is why it endures: it was never manufactured to be timeless.
It was simply the first tune her fingers found when she finally sat down.
Half a century later, guitar students still find their way to her melody.
And somewhere tonight, a singer is learning those same chords for the first time.
She asked if it was any good.