The 1970s File Feature
This Is It
"This Is It" — Melba Moore Melba Moore Between Broadway and Pop Melba Moore arrived in the popular music consciousness with a set of credentials that most po…
01 The Story
"This Is It" — Melba Moore
Melba Moore Between Broadway and Pop
Melba Moore arrived in the popular music consciousness with a set of credentials that most pop performers could not claim: she had won a Tony Award in 1970 for her performance in Purlie, a Broadway musical adapted from the play Purlie Victorious. That theatrical pedigree shaped everything about her as a recording artist, from the power and control of her voice to the emotional commitment she brought to even relatively modest pop material. By the spring of 1976, she was several albums into a recording career that had produced modest R&B chart success without generating the mainstream pop breakthrough her talent seemed to warrant. "This Is It" became one of her entries on the Hot 100, debuting at number 100 on April 24, 1976, and climbing over five weeks to its peak of number 91 on May 22, 1976.
The Vocal Instrument
What separated Melba Moore from most of her R&B contemporaries in the mid-1970s was the sheer range and power of her voice. Moore's vocal instrument was technically formidable: she could navigate from a rich, grounded lower register to an extraordinary upper range with seamless ease, and her Broadway training gave her an emotional precision that studio recording made especially vivid. "This Is It" is built to showcase these qualities, with a melodic structure that gives her room to demonstrate both the controlled intimacy of her middle range and the thrilling reach of her upper voice.
The production surrounding her vocal on this track reflected the mid-1970s R&B and soul aesthetic: warm and full, with rhythm section work that kept the groove present without overwhelming the vocal. The arrangement is tasteful in the way that the best Philadelphia-influenced soul production of the era consistently was, prioritizing the performer's voice above its own complexity.
The Chart Performance and its Context
The five-week climb from number 100 to number 91 on the Hot 100 was not a dramatic commercial achievement, but it placed the record in the mainstream's awareness during a period when the competition for chart real estate was fierce. The spring of 1976 found the Hot 100 populated with disco's early mainstream incursions alongside mainstream pop, funk, and soul recordings, creating an unusually competitive sonic landscape. Moore's record was fighting for radio time against a market that was actively reorganizing itself around the new dance music that would dominate the following two years.
Her R&B chart performance during this period was stronger than her pop crossover numbers suggested, reflecting an audience that found her voice and material deeply compelling within that genre context. The Hot 100 numbers understated the real depth of her commercial connection with R&B listeners.
A Career Built on Endurance
Melba Moore's recording career would extend through the decade and into the 1980s, when she achieved her biggest commercial success with tracks that benefited from more contemporary production styles. Her 1986 recording "A Little Bit More" reached the top five on the R&B chart and gave her a level of mainstream visibility that her earlier work had not consistently produced. But the through-line connecting the 1976 "This Is It" to her later successes was constant: the voice, always the voice, and the theatrical commitment that gave every recording she made a sense of genuine occasion.
The Broader Significance of Theatrical Vocalists in R&B
Moore occupied a specific position in 1970s R&B as part of a tradition of vocalists who brought theatrical training and technique to the genre. This lineage, which included artists whose roots were in gospel, theater, or classical training, consistently produced recordings that stood out for their vocal ambition and technical sophistication. "This Is It" is a solid example of what this tradition could produce in a period when the soul music genre was navigating its own commercial and artistic transitions.
Press play and let a voice of genuine theater-trained power remind you what R&B sounded like when it reached for something technically demanding.
"This Is It" — Melba Moore's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
02 Song Meaning
"This Is It" — Meaning and Legacy
The Declarative Moment
The title "This Is It" announces a particular kind of emotional stance: the moment of recognition, the threshold where possibility becomes commitment, where anticipation crystallizes into decision. Songs built around this declarative frame invite the listener into a moment of arrival rather than a story of getting there. The emotional payoff is front-loaded in the title itself; the song's task is then to make the listener feel the reality of that arrival, to convey the specific quality of the moment being announced. Melba Moore's version of this frame uses her extraordinary voice as the primary instrument of conviction; when she announces that this is it, the sheer authority of her vocal delivery makes the declaration feel unambiguous.
Moore's Theatrical Approach to Emotional Climax
Broadway training fundamentally reshapes how a singer understands the relationship between vocal performance and emotional communication. The theatrical tradition requires that emotion be externalized, made legible to an audience that may be sitting far from the performer, experiencing the performance not through headphones in an intimate space but through the air of a large theater. This training gives vocalists with Moore's background a particular skill: the ability to build to emotional climaxes that feel earned rather than manufactured, because they understand the structural arc of a performance as a journey toward those climaxes.
"This Is It" benefits from this understanding. The song builds in ways that feel intentional and purposeful rather than simply louder, with Moore's vocal choices constructing a shape that has genuine dramatic architecture.
Soul Music and the Language of Personal Declaration
Mid-1970s soul music had a strong tradition of the personal declaration song, tracks in which the vocalist announced a state of being or an intention with the full force of their artistic identity behind the statement. This tradition drew directly from gospel music, where declarative statements of faith and commitment were among the most common and emotionally powerful forms. Moore's gospel-and-theater vocal approach was perfectly suited to this kind of material, because both her gospel-influenced emotional delivery and her theatrical commitment to conviction served the declarative form.
The mid-1970s context for this kind of song also included the social reality of post-Civil Rights era Black America, where declarations of self-determination and personal agency carried a cultural weight that extended beyond their individual romantic contexts. Songs that affirmed individual power and presence resonated in this environment in ways that were both personal and broadly cultural.
The Voice as Argument
Perhaps the most significant artistic quality that Moore brought to "This Is It" was the way her voice functioned as its own argument for the song's emotional validity. Listeners do not need to analyze the lyrics or examine the production to understand what the song is communicating; they receive the emotional content directly through the physical experience of hearing her voice perform it. This is a quality that cannot be taught or manufactured through production technique; it is the product of genuine vocal gift combined with years of disciplined training and performance.
Her 1976 recordings, modest as their chart performances were, document a voice at a particular moment of its development: fully formed in its technique, still finding the commercial contexts that would allow its qualities to reach the widest possible audience.
Legacy in the Context of Black Female Vocalists
Melba Moore's career in the mid-1970s was part of the broader story of Black female vocalists in American popular music during a period of significant transition. The commercial landscape was shifting around her, with disco beginning its consolidation of the Black pop market, and the soul and R&B styles she had come up in were being required to adapt or cede ground. Her ability to continue producing commercially viable work through these transitions, while maintaining the vocal integrity that was her defining artistic quality, is a form of artistic durability worth acknowledging. "This Is It" is a document of that durability in its earlier phase.
"This Is It" — Melba Moore's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
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