“A Song for You” by Donny Hathaway

Leon Russell wrote "A Song for You" and cut it first, for his self-titled 1970 debut on Shelter Records, but Donny Hathaway made it his own on his 1971 album, Donny Hathaway. The song is a slow, aching plea to an estranged lover for forgiveness and a little understanding, and Hathaway carries it straight to church: his arrangement is soaked in gospel, and he sings it like a man with nothing left to hide.

Plenty of others have taken their shot at it, more than 200 artists across every kind of music, with Andy Williams among the first. But Hathaway's reading became a standard in its own right, one that cut so deep that listeners often took it for his own song, and it left its mark on the version the Carpenters recorded.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.