The 1970s File Feature
Evergreen (Love Theme From "A Star Is Born")
Evergreen (Love Theme From "A Star Is Born"): Recording History and Chart Success Few ballads of the 1970s carried the commercial and cultural weight of "Eve…
01 The Story
Evergreen (Love Theme From "A Star Is Born"): Recording History and Chart Success
Few ballads of the 1970s carried the commercial and cultural weight of "Evergreen (Love Theme From 'A Star Is Born')," the centerpiece of Barbra Streisand's 1976 soundtrack album for the rock-era remake of the classic Hollywood story. The song arrived at a moment when Streisand was already one of the most decorated performers in American music, yet it elevated her standing even further by winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 1977 ceremony, making her the first woman to win an Oscar for composing a song, as she co-wrote the melody with lyricist Paul Williams.
The film itself, directed by Frank Pierson and starring Streisand alongside Kris Kristofferson, was a major commercial event when it opened in December 1976. The production had been a famously turbulent one, with Streisand serving as a hands-on producer and creative force throughout, but the resulting soundtrack became one of the best-selling albums of the era. "Evergreen" was released as a single on Columbia Records and entered the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1977, beginning its ascent toward the top of the chart.
The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and held that position for three weeks in the spring of 1977, cementing its place as one of the signature ballads of the decade. It spent a total of twenty-three weeks on the Hot 100, an extended run that reflected its broad appeal across pop, adult contemporary, and easy-listening audiences. On the Adult Contemporary chart, where Streisand had always found a particularly receptive audience, the song was equally dominant, becoming one of the defining tracks on that format during its chart cycle.
The recording was produced by Phil Ramone, a New York-based producer whose work spanned genres from jazz to pop and who would go on to define much of the sophisticated pop sound of the late 1970s. Ramone constructed an arrangement that supported Streisand's voice without overwhelming it, building from spare beginnings to a lush orchestral climax that showcased her dynamic range. The string arrangements complemented the song's themes of enduring romantic devotion, and the overall production balance struck the precise tone the ballad required.
Paul Williams, who contributed the lyrics, was already a well-established songwriter by the mid-1970s, with credits ranging from soft-rock standards to Muppet songs. His collaboration with Streisand on "Evergreen" produced a lyric that used natural metaphors, particularly the imagery of a green and growing thing that persists through seasons and time, to describe the nature of lasting love. The combination of Williams's verbal imagery and Streisand's melodic conception created a song that felt simultaneously fresh and timeless.
The Grammy Award committees agreed with the song's broad reception. "Evergreen" won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1977, adding a major recording industry honor to its Oscar win and making Streisand one of the rare artists to have claimed both awards for the same composition. The dual recognition underscored the song's unusual achievement in bridging the worlds of cinema and pop radio with equal success.
In commercial terms, the "A Star Is Born" soundtrack album, of which "Evergreen" was the lead single and defining track, became one of the best-selling albums of 1976 and 1977, shipping platinum multiple times over. The album's success helped establish the model of the film-driven pop soundtrack as a major commercial format in the late 1970s, a pattern that would continue through the following decade with similar blockbuster releases. Streisand's visibility as both actress and musician was reinforced simultaneously, a rare convergence that few performers managed in the era.
Radio programmers embraced the song enthusiastically, and it became a fixture on adult contemporary stations for years after its initial release. Its presence in film compilations, retrospectives, and awards broadcasts kept it in public consciousness well beyond its original chart run. When Billboard and other music industry publications compiled retrospectives of the 1970s, "Evergreen" consistently appeared near the top of lists of the decade's most successful ballads, a reflection of both its chart dominance and its lasting emotional resonance with listeners.
The song also represented a milestone in Streisand's long recording career, which had begun in the early 1960s with her Broadway work and her debut on Columbia Records. By the time "Evergreen" reached number one, she had already accumulated a remarkable string of hits, but the combination of Oscar, Grammy, and a Hot 100 chart-topper in a single song made this particular moment stand apart in her catalog as the clearest demonstration of her ability to operate at the highest levels of multiple entertainment industries simultaneously.
02 Song Meaning
Evergreen: Themes of Enduring Love and the Art of the Film Ballad
"Evergreen (Love Theme From 'A Star Is Born')" is a song built around a single, sustained emotional argument: that genuine romantic love, unlike many things in the world, does not diminish with time but instead deepens and becomes more settled, like a plant that remains green across changing seasons. The central metaphor is pastoral and quiet, relying on natural imagery rather than dramatic declaration to make its case for permanence.
The lyric, written by Paul Williams to a melody composed by Barbra Streisand, describes a relationship that feels at once newly discovered and ancient, as though the two people involved have always known each other at some level deeper than conscious memory. This sense of predestination, of love that was meant to be and that time merely confirms rather than creates, was central to the emotional appeal of the song and aligned perfectly with the themes of the film it accompanied.
Within the narrative of "A Star Is Born," the 1976 film in which Streisand played an aspiring musician who rises as her lover declines, "Evergreen" functioned as both a love song and a statement of artistic identity. The song appeared in the film as an original composition by Streisand's character, a gesture that blurred the line between actress and artist in a way that was intentional and characteristic of how Streisand approached the project as a whole. The audience heard the song as belonging simultaneously to the fictional character and to Streisand herself.
This dual register gave the song an unusual emotional density. When listeners heard "Evergreen" on the radio, they brought the film's narrative weight with them, the story of love tested by fame and personal destruction, and that context added a layer of bittersweet feeling that a purely commercial pop ballad would not have carried on its own. The song worked as a standalone single but resonated more deeply when understood in relation to the film's arc of romantic devotion and loss.
The emotional register of the performance is one of quiet certainty rather than desperate longing. Streisand's vocal delivery, particularly in the verses, is restrained and almost conversational before opening into the full power of the chorus, a dynamic that mirrors the lyric's theme of love as something that grows gradually rather than arriving fully formed. The song suggests that the deepest kind of love is not the most spectacular kind but the most durable kind.
For Streisand's career identity, "Evergreen" served as a defining statement about her relationship to the ballad form. She had always been primarily a vocalist of the grand theatrical tradition, trained in Broadway dynamics and given to powerful climactic moments, but "Evergreen" showed a capacity for restraint and intimacy that some of her earlier work had not always demonstrated. The song's success broadened the range of emotional territory her audience associated with her name.
The Academy Award and Grammy Award for Song of the Year that the song received confirmed its standing not merely as a pop hit but as a work with artistic ambitions beyond chart performance. These honors placed it in the category of songs considered to have contributed something meaningful to the craft of popular songwriting, and the recognition helped secure its place in the permanent repertoire of American popular music rather than as a period curiosity. The song has continued to be performed and recorded in the decades since its original release, a sign that its emotional content transcends its specific late-1970s production context.
The broader significance of "Evergreen" within the film ballad tradition lies in the way it demonstrated that a song could serve its narrative function fully while also succeeding completely as an independent commercial and artistic entity. That balance, serving the film without being imprisoned by it, is one that many soundtrack compositions fail to achieve, making "Evergreen" a model of what the film song at its best can accomplish.
→ More from Barbra Streisand
View all Barbra Streisand hits →
→ More from the 1970s File
View all 1970s hits →
Keep digging