Every singer has a signature song, but few signatures were written as fast — or survived as close a call — as People. The opening line, about people who need people being the luckiest people in the world, became so completely identified with Barbra Streisand that it is easy to forget how accidental its existence was. The song was essentially composed in half an hour. The producers of the show it was written for tried to throw it out. And Streisand recorded her definitive version when she was twenty-one years old, weeks before the musical even reached Broadway.
The result was the first great hit of her recording career: a single that reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964, spent three weeks at No. 1 on the easy listening chart, and anchored the first No. 1 album of her life. This is the story of how a love song dashed off at a Florida cocktail party became the standard by which Streisand would be measured for the next sixty years.
A Love Song for Fanny Brice
People was written for Funny Girl, the Broadway musical based on the life of Fanny Brice, the Ziegfeld Follies comedienne, and her stormy romance with the gambler Nicky Arnstein. Streisand, a Brooklyn-born singer who had stopped a Broadway show cold two years earlier in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, was cast as Brice — a role that would make her a star. To write the score, the producers hired composer Jule Styne and lyricist Bob Merrill, two Broadway veterans who, remarkably, had never worked together.
Styne and Merrill met for the first time in 1962 in Palm Beach, Florida, and settled into an unusual working routine: they wrote their songs by day and tested them by night, performing the new material for Palm Beach socialites at cocktail parties and watching what landed. It was an unforgiving focus group. Songs that charmed a room full of wealthy party guests holding drinks might survive; songs that didn’t, died on the spot.
As the two men worked to build Fanny Brice’s character, they kept circling one problem. They needed a special love song — the moment where Fanny, a woman armored in jokes and ambition, admits what she feels for Nicky Arnstein. It had to be tender without being soft, and honest in a way the character rarely allowed herself to be anywhere else in the show. People was among the very first songs they wrote for the score, which makes what happened to it later all the stranger: the foundation stone of the musical was the piece its own producers most wanted to remove.
Thirty Minutes in Palm Beach
The solution arrived in a single burst, preserved in Theodore Taylor’s biography of Styne. The composer turned to his partner and told him he had been working on the idea Merrill had mentioned — a lyric about “a very special person.” Styne said he thought he had “a helluva melody for it.” Merrill’s response changed the song’s whole meaning. It wasn’t going to be about just a special person, he said — and then, as Styne played the melody again, he ad-libbed the line over it: “People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world.”
By Merrill’s account, the song essentially wrote itself in about thirty minutes. The shift Merrill made at the piano was small but decisive. A conventional love song about one special person became a philosophy: a confession that needing other people is not weakness but fortune. It was exactly the sentiment Fanny Brice — and, not incidentally, Barbra Streisand — would spend a career embodying: the tough exterior, the enormous need underneath.
The Song Broadway Almost Dropped
Here is the part that still seems impossible. During Funny Girl‘s out-of-town tryouts, the producers didn’t like People. The ballad was slow, reflective, and built on a single repeated idea — everything a nervous production team fears in a big, expensive musical that needs momentum. The song was marked for removal.
Merrill fought to keep it in the show. He finally won a single concession: one night, Streisand would be allowed to sing it on stage in front of an audience, and the audience would decide. She sang it, and it stopped the show. The number the producers had wanted to cut turned out to be the emotional summit of the evening — the moment the comedy stopped and the character’s heart was exposed. People stayed, and history, as the songwriters liked to say, was made.
Recorded Before the Curtain Rose
Columbia Records moved faster than Broadway did. On December 20, 1963, Streisand — twenty-one years old — recorded People in New York with producer Mike Berniker, and the single was released in January 1964, with another Funny Girl number, I Am Woman, on the flip side. The show was still on the road. Radio listeners across America met Fanny Brice’s great love song before Broadway audiences did.
When Funny Girl finally opened in New York on March 26, 1964 — it would run until July 1, 1967, and earn Styne and Merrill a Tony Award nomination — the song was already climbing the charts on its own. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Streisand’s first Top 40 hit, and spent three weeks at No. 1 on the easy listening chart in the summer of 1964. A show tune, recorded before opening night by a singer most of America had never seen, had become a national hit.
The Album, the Honors, and the Afterlife
Streisand rode the song to her first album triumph. Her fourth solo studio album, People, released in September 1964, became the first record of her career to reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, holding the top spot for five weeks on its way to platinum certification. The album collected three Grammy Awards, including Best Vocal Performance, Female for Streisand and a Best Accompaniment/Arrangement honor for Peter Matz. Even its cover made history of a quieter kind: the photograph of Streisand had been shot by Don Bronstein on Chicago’s Oak Street Beach in June 1963, while she was in town singing at Mister Kelly’s nightclub — a snapshot from the club days, repurposed for the coronation. In 2017, the Library of Congress selected the album for the National Recording Registry.
The song itself kept accumulating honors. Streisand’s recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998, and her performance of it in the Funny Girl film finished at No. 13 on the American Film Institute’s 2004 survey of the greatest songs in American cinema. Other singers kept returning to it: Andy Williams covered it the same year it appeared, Ella Fitzgerald recorded it live, The Tymes took it back into the Top 40 in 1968, and it became a celebrated showcase for Florence Ballard of the Supremes, one of the few leads she kept after the group became famous. Dionne Warwick, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, and Aretha Franklin all recorded it too — a measure of how quickly a show tune had become a standard that every serious singer felt obliged to test herself against. Half a century after that Palm Beach afternoon, Streisand revisited the song on her 2014 duets album Partners, singing it with Stevie Wonder — who had performed it at the 2011 MusiCares gala honoring her, a tribute nested inside a tribute.
It remains the purest example of her gift. Styne’s melody is almost hymn-like in its simplicity, and Merrill’s lyric makes its whole argument in one sentence. But it took Streisand — twenty-one, unknown to most of the country, singing a song her own producers had tried to delete — to understand what it really was: not a plea, but a declaration. The luckiest people in the world, she sang, are the ones who need people. She has spent sixty years proving the line true, one audience at a time.
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