Who put it out first
For Once in My Life
Not a Stevie Wonder original — Jean DuShon put it out first, on Cadet in 1966
Ask who did “For Once in My Life” first and nearly everyone answers Stevie Wonder, whose uptempo Tamla single was released on October 15, 1968 and went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. It was already a cover. Ron Miller and Orlando Murden wrote the song in 1965 for Motown’s publishing arm, and the first version the public could actually buy was Jean DuShon’s ballad, issued on Chess’s Cadet label in October 1966. Earlier still — and unheard at the time — was a Motown session tape by Connie Haines that stayed in the vault until 2015, which is why this page stops short of naming a single “first recording”: the sources genuinely disagree about who reached a microphone first. What none of them dispute is that Wonder was not the originator.
The record
Who put it out first
Released A stand-alone 7-inch single on Cadet, the Chess Records subsidiary, issued in October 1966, arranged by Bart Keyes and produced by Esmond Edwards ↗. It was never an album track: DuShon cut three LPs for the Chess group and the song is on none of them — the two Argo albums, Make Way for Jean DuShon (1964) and You Better Believe Me (1965), predate the composition, and the twelve-track listing of her Cadet LP Feeling Good (LP-4048) ↗ does not include it. Ron Miller had approached her only to demo the tune while he was still refining it, then liked her reading enough to let it stand as the record.
Charted Did not chart. Detroit’s WXYZ made it “Pick Hit of the Week” and it stalled there; Motown historian Adam White records that its sales as a single were negligible ↗. The first version of the song to reach the pop chart at all was Tony Bennett’s, in 1967, and only as far as number 91.
How the first record got buried
Miller was a Motown staff writer hunting for a voice to demo the song, and DuShon was singing for Chess. AllMusic’s Andrew Hamilton ↗ writes that Miller was impressed enough to let her keep it — which put Motown’s best new ballad on a rival label.
Berry Gordy noticed. Wikipedia records that on discovering Miller had co-written it, Gordy reportedly asked Chess not to promote the single ↗; DuShon’s manager John Levy put it more bluntly in his memoir, quoted by American Songwriter ↗, saying Gordy stopped radio stations playing it.
Motown had tapes of its own already. Adam White places Connie Haines first among Motown’s own recordings of the song ↗, at a California session produced by Hal Davis and Marc Gordon, swiftly followed by Barbara McNair — but Haines’s take sat in the tape library and McNair’s waited for an album.
Wonder’s version nearly did not appear either. Gordy disliked the upbeat arrangement and shelved it ↗ until Billie Jean Brown, who ran Motown’s quality control department, talked him into releasing it in October 1968. DuShon later said simply that it was a great disappointment and that the song “wasn’t mine anymore.”
Adam White traces the song from the 1965 Motown tapes to the 1968 hitKnow more about the original — or think we’ve got it wrong? Add a source →
Fact-check
Setting the record straight
At least three published accounts of this song’s earliest sessions are in circulation and they contradict one another — including two Wikipedia articles that disagree between themselves. Here is what survives the checking, and what does not.
Stevie Wonder
His Tamla single was released on October 15, 1968 — after Jean DuShon’s Cadet single, after Barbara McNair’s album track, and after Tony Bennett had already put the song on the pop chart. AllMusic states the cause plainly: because so few people ever heard DuShon’s record, it is often mistakenly believed that Wonder cut the original.
Jean DuShon
This is the firmest fact on the page. Wikipedia and Adam White independently name DuShon’s single as the first version of the song commercially released. It did not chart.
Connie Haines — probably
Wikipedia’s song article dates a Haines session at Motown to July 1965 on the evidence of the label’s own session logs and tape information, and Adam White places her first among Motown’s own recordings, at a California session under producers Hal Davis and Marc Gordon. But Wikipedia’s article on Ron Miller says McNair recorded it first, its article on DuShon implies Gordy only had Haines and McNair cut it after hearing the 1966 Cadet single, and American Songwriter dates DuShon’s own session to July 1966. We cannot reconcile these, so we do not assert a first recording.
Ron Miller and Orlando Murden
Neither DuShon nor Wonder wrote it. The Cadet label copy compounded matters by crediting Murden alone — and it was Gordy’s discovery that his own contracted writer Miller was the other half that reportedly triggered the pressure on Chess.
Nobody can say for certain who sang it into a microphone first. Everybody can say it was not Stevie Wonder.
Context
Why the cover buried the original
The usual reason a cover eclipses an original is that the cover is simply better known. Here something more deliberate happened. Ron Miller was under contract to Motown, but he gave the song to a singer on Chess — a label whose A&R man, Billy Davis, was Berry Gordy’s former songwriting partner and active rival. When DuShon’s single started making noise on Detroit radio, Gordy reportedly asked Chess not to promote it. Her manager John Levy went further in his memoir, writing that Gordy stopped stations playing it outright.
So the record did not lose a fair fight; it was taken off the field. It reached “Pick Hit of the Week” on WXYZ and stopped there, sold negligibly, and never made an album. By the time Wonder’s remake arrived in 1968, there was no widely heard earlier version left for anyone to remember — the Haines tape was in a vault, McNair’s was buried on an LP, and DuShon’s had been quietly starved. The absence is the whole explanation.
The full chronology, step by step
- 1965 — Ron Miller writes the lyric to Orlando Murden’s melody, reportedly on the night his daughter is born. The song is published by Motown’s Stein & Van Stock. Miller passes lead sheets round Detroit; club singers Jo Thompson and Sherry Kaye each later claim to have performed it first.
- July 1965 — Connie Haines records it at Motown, per the label’s session logs. The tape is shelved.
- October 1965 — Barbara McNair records a version with orchestra, produced by Frank Wilson. It is not released at the time.
- October 1966 — Jean DuShon’s Cadet single appears: the first version of the song the public can buy. It becomes a local Detroit hit and goes no further.
- November 1966 — McNair’s recording finally surfaces, on her album Here I Am.
- 1967 — Tony Bennett’s recording becomes the first to reach the pop chart, at number 91, and number eight on Easy Listening. It is also the title track of his album.
- October 15, 1968 — Stevie Wonder’s uptempo remake is released on Tamla after Gordy’s veto is overturned. It reaches number two pop and number two R&B.
- 2015 — Haines’s 1965 Motown session is issued at last, on the download compilation Motown Unreleased 1965.
The original did not lose a fair fight. It was taken off the field.