In the summer of 1967, Stevie Wonder recorded "For Once in My Life" as a fast, driving soul track for Motown, and Berry Gordy refused to release it. The song had been written for Motown's publishing company as a slow ballad and originally recorded in 1965. By the time Wonder took it on, the tune had a settled identity as a gentle showcase, the kind of song a label head could trust. What he and producer Henry Cosby built was faster, leaner and far more urgent. Gordy heard the tapes, said no, and the record went to the shelf. The company's chief had made his call, and it looked final. Stevie Wonder released “For Once in My Life” on October 15, 1968.
A ballad the label trusted
The song had already been moving through the Motown roster for a while. Several singers on the label had tried it as a poised ballad. Outside Motown, a Detroit radio station had named another singer's earlier version its pick hit of the week. The melody kept attracting voices, but the slow arrangement never forced the company to change its mind. Stevie Wonder's fast take was an outlier, not an obvious single. The safe move, from the label's point of view, was to leave the song as a ballad.
The fight to get the record released fell to Billie Jean Brown, who ran Motown's quality-control department. She pressed Berry Gordy until he allowed the single out. On 15 October 1968, the record finally appeared, more than a year after Stevie Wonder had made it. The song had already passed through plenty of Motown singers by then, but none had broken it this way. A delay like that could have buried it for good. Instead, Brown's intervention turned a rejected tape into a defining Motown single.
Jamerson's restless bass line
The difference was audible from the opening bars of the record. James Jamerson played the bass line as a continuous, probing improvisation: melodic, constantly shifting, and no bar repeated. It did not simply hold the bottom down; it moved around Stevie Wonder's vocal. Stevie Wonder's harmonica and voice sat above that motion. The Motown house band supplied the drive, but Jamerson's playing gave the record its restless center. This was not the polite ballad the song had been imagined to be.
James Jamerson played the bass line as a continuous, probing improvisation: melodic, constantly shifting, and no bar repeated.
Listeners were not as cautious as Berry Gordy had been. The single climbed to number two on both the American pop and rhythm-and-blues charts. A rival American trade chart put it at the very top spot. The record had too much momentum to stay buried for long. In Stevie Wonder's hands, a song that began as a slow ballad had become a hit on the strength of its speed. The public had settled the argument that the label could not, and the speed that had worried Gordy was now the record's selling point.
There was a final irony at the top of the chart. The song that kept Stevie Wonder's single from the top spot on the two main American charts was another Motown record Berry Gordy had initially rejected: "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" by Marvin Gaye. Two shelved recordings were now the two biggest soul singles in the country. Gordy's doubts had been wrong in both cases. The label's discard pile had produced a moment of pop dominance. A pair of songs he had tried to stop were defining the label's year.
The song later gave its title to Stevie Wonder's album "For Once in My Life." Years later, the recording also appeared in the closing credits of a computer-animated sequel. It later picked up a platinum certification in a major market. The shelved tape had become a durable hit. Fifty-eight years after that October release, the clearest proof is in the playing. James Jamerson's bass line, fully improvised, melodic, and built to cradle Wonder's vocal, never repeats a bar and never stops moving.