This Time Last Summer

Album: Single Release Only (1965)
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Songfacts®:

  • When Jimmy Webb was a fledgling young writer hawking his songs, nobody showed any interest apart from, rather bizarrely, Motown Records. He worked at the West Coast office of Jobete Music, the Detrot label's publishing arm, and this was the song that earned him the gig.

    "It happened with Motown because the receptionist felt sorry for me," he recalled to Mojo magazine. "She would take me out to lunch and say,'You poor little skinny thing, why do you want to be a song writer? She was really good hearted. One day she took a song of mine called 'This Time Last Summer' through to the offices. I heard it being played and that was when the door opened, metaphorically and physically, like a miracle out of the Bible. They signed me as a writer and I wrote 45 songs for a smoking hot company where everyone else was African-American."
  • The song was recorded in 1965 by Brenda Holloway, who was a Motown recording artist for four years during the 1960s. Her best-known recordings were the Top 40 tunes "Every Little Bit Hurts," "When I'm Gone" and "You've Made Me So Very Happy." The latter was the original version of Blood, Sweat & Tears' hit tune.
  • Jazz singer Nancy Wilson covered this in 1975 for her Come Get To This album.

Comments: 1

  • Barry from Sauquoit, NyOn May 6th, 1967, Brenda Holloway performed "Just Look What You've Done" on Dick Clark's ABC-TV Saturday afternoon program 'American Bandstand'...
    At the time the song was at #73 on Billboard's Hot Top 100 chart; a week later it would peak at #69, the following week it remained at #69 and that was it's last week on the Top 100...
    Between 1964 and 1967 she had six* Top 100 records, her biggest hit was "Every Little Bit Hurts", it peaked at #13 {for 2 weeks} on May 31st, 1964...
    Ms. Holloway will celebrate her 71st birthday next month on June 21st {2017}...
    * Her sixth and last charted record was the original version of "You've Made Me So Very Happy" in 1967, two years later Blood, Sweat, & Tears' covered version of the song would peak at #2 for 3 weeks, and for the three weeks it was at #2, the #1 record for those 3 weeks was "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (Medley)" by The 5th Dimension.
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