The 1960s File Feature
It Was A Very Good Year
Della Reese and the Autumn of "It Was A Very Good Year" Few standards in the American songbook carry the elegiac weight of "It Was A Very Good Year," a song …
01 The Story
Della Reese and the Autumn of "It Was A Very Good Year"
Few standards in the American songbook carry the elegiac weight of "It Was A Very Good Year," a song that arrived quietly in the early 1960s and grew, through a series of celebrated recordings, into one of the era's most recognizable meditations on memory, passage, and the bittersweet texture of a life well lived. The song was written by Ervin Drake, a prolific New York-based composer and lyricist whose credits stretched across Broadway, film, and the pop world. Drake composed the song in 1961, originally performing it himself at folk gatherings, and it was first recorded that year by Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio for the group's 1961 album Close-Up. That version introduced the song to a mainstream American audience but did not generate significant chart activity on its own.
The song's commercial breakthrough came with Frank Sinatra, whose recording for Reprise Records appeared on his landmark 1965 concept album September of My Years. Arranger Gordon Jenkins gave the track a lush, autumnal orchestral setting that perfectly matched Sinatra's mature vocal authority, and the album won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year at the 1966 ceremony. Sinatra's single version reached number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1965, and his interpretation essentially became the definitive one in the public imagination, framing the song forever as a vehicle for a seasoned performer looking back across the decades of his life.
It was against this backdrop that Della Reese recorded her own interpretation for ABC-Paramount Records in 1966. Reese was by then an established and deeply respected figure in American popular music and entertainment. Born Delloreese Patricia Early in Detroit, Michigan, on July 6, 1931, she had grown up singing gospel under the influence of Mahalia Jackson before transitioning to jazz and pop performance in the mid-1950s. Her 1959 recording "Don't You Know," adapted from Puccini's La Boheme, reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and established her as a genuine commercial force. Through the early 1960s she continued to record for ABC-Paramount and Jubilee, developing a reputation as a technically accomplished vocalist with exceptional interpretive range and a powerful contralto instrument.
Her 1966 recording of "It Was A Very Good Year" demonstrated the qualities that made her interpretations distinctive. Where Sinatra's version emphasized wistful nostalgia delivered with masculine authority, Reese's reading brought an emotional directness and vocal warmth that reframed the song from a slightly different perspective. The production, suited to the adult contemporary market of the mid-1960s, relied on conventional string and woodwind arrangements of the period, placing her voice prominently in the mix so that the narrative arc of the lyric could carry its full weight. The recording was released as a single on ABC-Paramount Records, the label that had been her commercial home for much of her career.
On the Billboard Hot 100, Reese's version debuted at number 100 on the chart dated September 10, 1966, and climbed one position to peak at number 99 during its second week on the chart dated September 17, 1966. The song spent two weeks on the Hot 100, a modest showing that reflected both the saturation of Sinatra's dominant version and the competitive nature of the fall 1966 singles market. Despite the limited chart run on the pop side, the recording found a receptive audience in the adult contemporary and easy listening market segments that Reese had long cultivated.
Della Reese's career in the years surrounding this recording reflected a performer navigating a transitional moment in American popular music. The British Invasion and the rise of rock-oriented sounds had reshaped the commercial landscape, and the polished adult pop recordings that had sustained careers like Reese's through the late 1950s and early 1960s faced increased competition for chart positions and radio airplay. Nevertheless, Reese continued to maintain a devoted following, and her television work in this period helped sustain her visibility with a broad audience.
Her legacy would ultimately extend far beyond any single chart position. By the time she became widely known to a new generation as Tess on the television series Touched by an Angel, which ran from 1994 to 2003, she had accumulated decades of recordings, live performance, and television work that made her one of the most durable and respected entertainers in the American tradition. She was ordained as a minister of the Understanding Principles for Better Living Church in Los Angeles and brought genuine spiritual conviction to her later public work. She passed away on November 19, 2017, at the age of 86.
Her recording of "It Was A Very Good Year" stands, within the context of her career, as a thoughtful contribution to a song that had already proven its emotional durability. It confirmed Reese's ability to find something personal and authentic within material already associated with one of the greatest popular vocalists who ever lived, and it demonstrated the interpretive courage that defined her at her best.
02 Song Meaning
The Architecture of Memory in "It Was A Very Good Year"
Ervin Drake's "It Was A Very Good Year" is structured as a formal retrospective, a speaker moving through the distinct chapters of his life and finding in each a defining image of beauty, companionship, and transient pleasure. The song is organized as a series of age-specific stanzas, each anchored to a particular stage of life: the innocence of youth at seventeen, the discovery of sophistication in early adulthood at twenty-one, the acquisition of experience and perhaps power in the mature years at thirty-five, and finally the autumnal perspective of old age when the vintage of a life is assessed. This architectural simplicity is one of the song's most powerful qualities. Drake avoided the temptation to complicate the structure or introduce narrative conflict, trusting instead that the mere passage of time, rendered concretely through the accumulating stanzas, would carry sufficient emotional weight.
Each stage of life is evoked through the imagery of women encountered in specific, evocative settings. The girls of seventeen encountered in small-town softness; the independent women of the city encountered in limousines, suggesting a world of sophistication and acquired means; the blue-blooded women with their perfumed hair suggesting the settled pleasures of mature social belonging. These images function less as specific romantic narratives and more as metonyms for entire phases of experience. They represent the quality of aliveness that characterized each period, the particular texture of pleasure and engagement available to the speaker at that moment in his life. Drake was writing about consciousness and experience, using romantic encounter as the most vivid available shorthand for being fully present in the world.
The wine metaphor that runs through the lyric gives the song its organizing conceit and its title. A very good year, in the language of wine, means a vintage in which the conditions aligned to produce something exceptional, something worthy of being laid down and remembered. The speaker applies this evaluative framework to the years of his own life, determining that each period, in its own way, constitutes a very good year. This is a fundamentally optimistic and generous assessment of a human life, one that finds value and quality in each distinct stage rather than privileging one over the others.
The final stanza, when the speaker has arrived at the autumn of his years, introduces a subtle but significant tonal shift. The wine metaphor reasserts itself with greater elegiac force: the vintage is described as fine, but the speaker is now in the season of assessment rather than the season of acquisition. The very good year, in this final iteration, carries the weight of accumulated time and implies an awareness of finitude that the earlier stanzas deliberately held at bay. This is where the song earns its emotional complexity. Drake structured the lyric so that the apparent simplicity of the refrain accumulates meaning with each repetition, arriving at the final chorus carrying far more gravity than it did at the opening.
For Della Reese, whose own biography included gospel roots, major commercial success, personal hardship, and eventual spiritual vocation, the song's themes of retrospection and gratitude would have resonated on multiple levels. Her reading brought an emotional earnestness to the material that complemented its inherent dignity. The song's willingness to look backward without bitterness and forward without denial made it an enduring vehicle for performers of a certain maturity and depth, and Reese's version stands as evidence of that enduring resonance.
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