Songfacts®:

• When Jimmy Webb was a fledgling young writer hawking his songs, nobody showed any interest apart from, rather bizarrely, Motown Records. He worked at the West Coast office of Jobete Music, the Detrot label's publishing arm, and this was the song that earned him the gig.
  
  "It happened with Motown because the receptionist felt sorry for me," he recalled to Mojo magazine. "She would take me out to lunch and say,'You poor little skinny thing, why do you want to be a song writer? She was really good hearted. One day she took a song of mine called 'This Time Last Summer' through to the offices. I heard it being played and that was when the door opened, metaphorically and physically, like a miracle out of the Bible. They signed me as a writer and I wrote 45 songs for a smoking hot company where everyone else was African-American."
• The song was recorded in 1965 by Brenda Holloway, who was a Motown recording artist for four years during the 1960s. Her best-known recordings were the Top 40 tunes "Every Little Bit Hurts," "When I'm Gone" and "You've Made Me So Very Happy." The latter was the original version of Blood, Sweat & Tears' hit tune.
• Jazz singer Nancy Wilson covered this in 1975 for her Come Get To This album.