1971 · Behind the Songs
It was never meant to be a single — until a London DJ changed its fate.
“I’m Still Waiting” was written and produced by Deke Richards and recorded in 1970 at Hitsville U.S.A.’s Studio A in Detroit. It first appeared as an album track on Everything Is Everything, Ross’s second solo LP — and that is where Motown intended to leave it. The song continued the sophisticated soul vein of her breakthrough solo hit “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” but nobody at the label saw a single in it.
Then a London disc jockey intervened. BBC Radio 1’s Tony Blackburn began playing the album cut heavily on his morning programme, and his enthusiasm persuaded EMI — which issued all Tamla Motown material in Britain at the time — to release it as a single in July 1971, backed with “A Simple Thing Like Cry.” What followed was a chart story split cleanly down the middle of the Atlantic: four weeks at No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart that August, plus No. 1 in Ireland — against a mere No. 63 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 40 on the R&B chart back home.
The British success was big enough to rename an album: the UK edition of her Surrender LP was retitled I’m Still Waiting in its wake. The song refused to stay in the past, either — DJ Phil Chill’s 1990 remix reached No. 21 in Britain, and that same summer Courtney Pine and Carroll Thompson took their own version into the UK charts. Even a former Supreme got in on the act: Scherrie Payne cut the song for producer Ian Levine’s Motorcity label.