That one song: O-o-h Child by The Five Stairsteps

It's like basking in the rays of a beautiful sun.

Someday is a loaded word.

It holds promise, but it reminds you that you need to manage your expectations.

That there is much that you may need to endure before you can realize your dreams.

And there is always a chance that you may not live to see that someday, or that it, to quote John Fogarty, never comes.

I often wonder how people who write songs that promise a better day feel about those songs 10, 20, or even 55 years on.

Do they feel like those days are just as distant?

Or do they feel they are closer than ever?

For the past few months, I have been listening to O-o-h Child, the only top 40 pop hit by The Five Stairsteps.

Based in Chicago, the group was known as the first family of soul before a certain group from Gary, Indiana, usurped that title.

The Stairsteps were siblings—Clarence Jr., Alohe, James, Dennis, and Kenneth Burke.

Their father, Clarence Sr., a member of the Chicago police force, served as manager, bassist, and a songwriter for the Stairsteps.

Their mother, Betty, gave the group its name, based on how the children looked when lined up according to their age.

A sixth Burke sibling, Cubie, eventually joined the group, and ma and pa Stairsteps also recorded a single or two of their own.

By dint of serendipity, their neighbor was Fred Cash, a member of The Impressions, who connected the Stairsteps with Curtis Mayfield.

He signed them to his label, Windy C, and they scored a few top 20 R&B hits between 1966 and 1970, but none cracked the Billboard Top 40 pop chart.

The closest they came was World of Fantasy, which reached #49 in 1966.

By 1970, the group were recording for Buddah Records, which had distributed their Windy C releases.

Buddah had achieved significant chart success with bubblegum records from the production team of Kasenetz-Katz.

For better or worse, Buddah didn’t connect the group with that team.

Instead, they entrusted the Five Stairsteps to Stan Vincent.

Also hailing from Chicago, Vincent had been in the entertainment business for more than a decade, first as a child actor on the Watch Mr. Wizzard series, and then as a record producer and songwriter who scored hits with The Earls and Connie Francis.

At Buddah, he produced a big hit for Lou Christie in 1969 with I’m Gonna Make You Mine.

It was written by Tony Romeo, best known for writing I Think I Love You.

In an interview, Keni Burke said that the group were introduced to Vincent at the Apollo some time after the Christie song was a hit.

He noted that Vincent’s songs were different from what the group had previously recorded, but they were open to his ideas.

He also said they had no idea that O-o-h Child had chart potential.

In fact, it doesn’t seem like anyone did.

When the song was released on a single in early 1970, it was a B-side.

The A-side was Dear Prudence.

The single stiffed and that might have been that, but for a DJ in Philadelphia who happened to spin the record’s B-side

The record caught on and peaked on the pop chart at #8.

In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine anyone not seeing O-o-h Child’s potential.

But a Beatles cover probably seemed like an easier way to get the Five Stairsteps a crossover hit.

Which proves no one knows anything.

In all honesty, O-o-h Child shouldn’t work.

For one, the lyrics are written in such a way that they feel like reassurance from a parent to a child.

The Five Stairsteps were just kids at the time they recorded it.

How could they convey its lyrics with anything approaching confidence or authority?

It also isn’t helped by the fact that it is somewhat vague and leans on hippie lingo.

‘We’ll put it together and we’ll get it undone’ indeed.

And the strings are a bit heavy handed.

But two of those seeming flaws become the song’s strengths.

For one, by having the Stairsteps, in particular Alohe, give voice to the song’s fundamental optimism, O-o-h Child never succumbs to saccharine sentimentality or pretense.

It is the sound of youth speaking to youth, if not their peers, then future generations.

They embody the song’s central conceit of a better future, one that they might achieve, or their children.

In that way, O-o-h Child’s message of hope isn’t compromised.

If anything, it is accentuated.

And the vagueness of the lyrics means it not only avoids sounding dated, but also that it manages to feel universal in its aspirations.

O-o-h Child was recorded and charted during a time of considerable social upheaval.

It followed the Stonewall riots, it existed in the shadow of the Vietnam War, it was on the radio during the Kent State shootings, and it was still charting high during the Women’s Strike for Equality in August 1970.

It doesn’t speak to any of these events or their root causes specifically.

But the tenor of the times, not to mention the afterglow of Woodstock and the moon landing, informs it.

It may sound of its time, what with the panning of the drums and other effects, but it never sounds like it is caught in amber.

Because it still speaks to humanity’s deepest aspirations for a brighter tomorrow.

How can they be sure?

The song doesn’t say.

It’s short on wisdom but long on reassurance.

And because the lyrics are not complicated with specifics on why or how things will get better, you are free to interpret O-o-h Child as you see fit, even if what you think is better is the prevailing political policies of the times.

Being very concerned about the state of current affairs, this song speaks to that someday I long for that seems about as far away as ever.

I mean, I am grateful I can live the way I want to live where I live, something I couldn’t have tried to do years ago, but I also sense that this freedom is precarious and under constant threat.

So O-o-h Child sounds like it always has to me: a promise that is appealing but unfulfilled.

It is and has always been bittersweet.

And yet, when the Stairsteps start singing ‘right now’ at the end, you get the sense they aren’t content to wait for someday either.

In the space of a three-minute pop song, they do make things better.

They meet you where you are, reassure you, and dare you to dream about walking in the rays of a beautiful sun.

Which, if you think about it, you don’t need to wait that long to do.

You can do that any time the weather is favorable.

And if you can’t put it all together in a given day, at least in the moment you can get it all undone.

Which is to say right now.