And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going

  • Artist – Album: Jennifer Holliday – Dreamgirls: Original Broadway Cast Album

I had known about the song And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going from Dreamgirls for some time, but I had never actually heard it until Jessica Sanchez did it during the final of American Idol (Season 11) in a duet with the original singer, Jennifer Holliday.

Well, sing is a gross generalization of what happened. The situation was described much more accurately by web-series show Idology, where AI6 contestant Melinda Doolittle said it was the time “…when Jennifer Holliday ate Jessica Sanchez’s face!”

The duet performance was either crazy amazing, or just crazy.  But it piqued my interest for what the original sounded like. It couldn’t be like this, could it? So I found a performance on YouTube that Jennifer Holliday did for the 1982 Tony Awards, with an intro by Tony Randall(?!).

All I can say is that it lived up to all the hype I had heard about the song. Jennifer wrenched all the emotion out of the room with this performance, and then some. It was not just a highlight of the show, but a career-defining singing tour de force. And Jennifer was only 21 when she did it!

This one is definitely worth listening to to see what the fuss is about.

Google Play Music Link: https://play.google.com/store/music/album?id=Ba2cbm22bp6o53ea6lbg5xmv7pq&tid=song-Tbujqbcnzmaeakt4nisdzbnipvq

Previous Music Monday Selections: https://kevinianbryan.com/musicmonday.html

Leave a Comment

Filed under Music Monday

Comments are closed.