He Touched Me

Barbra Streisand and the Broadway Connection: "He Touched Me" (1965)

By the autumn of 1965, Barbra Streisand had achieved a level of celebrity that was unusual even by the elevated standards of American entertainment stardom. Her debut Broadway performance in I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962 had attracted disproportionate critical attention for a supporting role; her subsequent starring turn in Funny Girl, which opened on Broadway in March 1964, had confirmed her as the dominant theatrical personality of her generation. Her recording career, pursued simultaneously with her stage work, had produced a series of Columbia Records albums that combined Broadway material, popular standards, and original songs into a body of work that demonstrated the unusual breadth of her artistic ambitions.

The song "He Touched Me" came from the Broadway musical Drat! The Cat!, a production with music and lyrics by Milton Schafer and Ira Levin respectively. Ira Levin, who would later become famous as the author of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, was working in the musical theater form at this point in his career, and "He Touched Me" was one of his most accomplished songs in that context. The musical itself opened and closed quickly on Broadway in October 1965, running only eight performances, but the title song outlived the production by decades through Streisand's recording.

Streisand's decision to record the song for single release in 1965 demonstrated her characteristic ability to identify material of genuine quality regardless of its commercial context. A song from a failed Broadway production was not an obvious choice for a pop single, but Streisand's taste operated by different criteria than simple commercial logic. She heard in "He Touched Me" a lyrical and melodic construction of unusual delicacy that suited her particular vocal strengths, and she was correct: the recording became one of the more distinctive singles of her mid-decade output.

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 2, 1965, entering at number 99. Its chart climb was gradual but sustained over ten weeks, reflecting the kind of slow-building audience acceptance that characterized Streisand's singles during this period. The track moved steadily upward through October and November before reaching its peak position of number 53 on November 20, 1965. This performance was consistent with Streisand's reputation as an albums artist whose singles, while successful, rarely achieved the top-twenty positions that her album sales comfortably exceeded.

The production of the single reflected the sophisticated orchestral approach that Columbia Records and arranger Peter Matz brought to Streisand's recordings during this period. Matz, who worked with Streisand on numerous recordings throughout the 1960s, understood how to construct arrangements that showcased her voice without constraining it, providing musical surroundings that were rich enough to be interesting but not so elaborate as to compete with the vocal performance itself. The result was a recording that felt expansive without being overwrought, a balance that requires considerable skill to achieve.

Streisand's vocal performance on "He Touched Me" demonstrated the full range of qualities that had made her famous. Her voice combined technical precision with emotional expressiveness in a proportion that defied the conventional opposition between craft and feeling; she was simultaneously controlled and abandoned, disciplined and spontaneous. The song's subject, the transformative power of physical contact within a romantic context, gave her an opportunity to communicate vulnerability alongside power, and she navigated the combination with the assurance of an artist who had spent years learning to inhabit emotionally complex material.

The Broadway-to-pop crossover that Streisand represented was not unprecedented but was particularly well-executed in her case. She understood intuitively that the theatrical vocal tradition and the pop tradition were not fundamentally incompatible, that the techniques learned from singing Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim could be applied productively to contemporary pop material and vice versa. "He Touched Me" was a piece of material that bridged the two worlds; it was a Broadway song that worked as a pop single because its emotional content was human rather than theatrical in the limiting sense, and Streisand's recording communicated that humanity with complete conviction.

Ira Levin's lyric for "He Touched Me" achieved something that lyrics in the Broadway tradition at its best regularly achieve: a precision of emotional description that feels both specific and universal. The song captured a particular moment of recognition, the instant when physical contact from the right person transforms from ordinary sensation into revelation. This specificity was what Streisand's recording honored and communicated, elevating a song from a failed musical into a lasting record of what popular singing could accomplish at its finest.