Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘September’: The Date That Was Never Supposed to Mean Anything
Allee Willis co-wrote one of the most played party songs ever recorded, and for about 40 years she gave the same answer to the same question. Why the 21st of September? It meant nothing, she’d say. The date just sounded best when you sang it. She said in a 2019 newspaper interview that she gave that answer about 15 times a day. Then, in 2018, she went to lunch with Maurice White’s widow and found out she’d been getting it wrong the whole time.
That twist is the best part of the story, but it’s far from the only good bit. ‘September’ started life as a filler track for a greatest hits album. It was finished on a midnight deadline after a fight over three nonsense syllables. And its lyricist was living on food stamps a couple of blocks from the studio when the phone rang.
Quick Answers
• Who wrote it? Guitarist Al McKay built the musical foundation. Maurice White and Allee Willis wrote the lyrics.
• When did it come out? 18 November 1978, as a new track on The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire Vol. 1. It hit number one on the US R&B chart, number eight on the Hot 100 and number three in the UK.
• What does ‘ba-de-ya’ mean? Nothing. Willis begged White to replace it with real words and lost.
• Why the 21st? Publicly, because it sang best. Privately, it was reportedly the original due date of White’s son Kahbran, who arrived early on 1 August 1978.
• Why does everyone play it on 21 September? Fans turned the date into an unofficial holiday, and streams of the song jump every year.
Three Songs, One Groove
Most people treat ‘September’ as a one-off smash. Maurice White didn’t. In his memoir he described it as the last of a trilogy he wrote with McKay, all built from the same groove and feel, as the Library of Congress notes in its essay on the song. First came ‘Sing a Song’, an Earth, Wind & Fire top-five hit. Second came ‘Best of My Love’, which they handed to The Emotions and which went to number one. Willis later said that put a lot of pressure on the third one, because it had to beat both of them.
McKay, who’d earlier played with Ike and Tina Turner and Sammy Davis Jr, said the first two came out of the band’s dressing room. He’d sit tuning up, start playing ideas and hear Maurice singing over the top of them. ‘September’ came differently. McKay told Spotify in 2018 he came downstairs one morning feeling good, set up a groove in his home studio and built it piece by piece. Maurice loved it straight away and kept making him play it again, until the last time round he started singing.
White knew about grooves the hard way. He left Memphis for Chicago at 18 and worked as a session drummer at Chess Records, playing behind Etta James, Muddy Waters and Ramsey Lewis. It’s the same session-drummer trade that made Hal Blaine the most recorded musician in history. If you fancy more on Muddy Waters, we’ve covered his station show with Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
The song is cleverer than it sounds, too. NYU music theory professor Jeffrey Peretz has compared the chorus to the four seasons, with four chords that keep moving forward and never quite land. American Songwriter spotted a sneaky tweak as well. The third time the verse loop comes round, one chord flips from minor to major, and Verdine White’s bass adds the note that makes it happen.
The Songwriter on Food Stamps
Willis wasn’t supposed to be in that room. She grew up in Detroit and was scraping by in Los Angeles on food stamps and Medi-Cal when a friend paired her with Verdine White to write for other acts. Verdine told her from day one he’d mention her to his brother. She didn’t believe him. About ten days later her phone rang. It was Maurice White, asking if she wanted to write the entire next Earth, Wind & Fire album with him.
The studio was within walking distance of her flat. She turned up the next day, heard the band working on the intro and thought it was the happiest music she’d ever heard. She’d been brought in to help the band reach beyond their core audience, alongside David Foster. ‘September’ was the one new song going on the greatest hits album, so it had to be finished first, while the songs for I Am were written around it.
Maurice also handed her a reading list. He asked whether she knew anything about Eastern philosophies, and she didn’t. She described herself as “about as evolved as Pop Rocks”. He sent her to a Los Angeles bookshop she said reeked of incense, where the first book was Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World, all metaphors and ancient Egyptians. She panicked and wanted to go and watch Soul Train instead. That fits, because Willis had spent her childhood sitting on the lawn outside Motown in Detroit, soaking up the drums, bass and backing vocals leaking through the walls. She says that was the only music education she ever had.
It took three to four months to finish ‘September’ and the rest of the I Am album, and the ‘September’ lyric alone ate up 20 single-spaced pages.
Three Syllables and a Midnight Deadline
Willis was a journalism major who believed lyrics had to be seriously intelligent. Maurice used ‘ba-de-ya’ as a go-to phrase in song after song, and he’d been singing it in the chorus from the start. She was sure nobody would know what it meant. He told her it was fine. She spent months asking him to change it.
The showdown came on the final night. The master had to be finished by midnight, and at around ten o’clock White was recording the last vocals when Willis dropped to her knees and begged him to swap in real words. White remembered her being close to tears. He put an arm around her and told her he couldn’t let “a bulky lyric get in the way of a melodic groove”.
She lost, and she’s been glad about it ever since. Willis applied the lesson to later hits like ‘Neutron Dance’ and the Friends theme. She also loved that listeners often think the syllables are real words, and she called ‘ba-de-ya’ her favourite phrase ever invented.
The Date That Never Meant Nothing
The date had its own edit. Willis says she rediscovered her original folder of notes in 2019, after losing track of it for 40 years. Maurice’s sheet of ideas already had the 21st of September on it, but he’d written ‘day’. Willis told him it had to be ‘night’ because that was more romantic. She also tried other dates, but the twenty-first, with its three syllables, sat best in the groove.
That was the official story for decades. Then, at that lunch in 2018, a fan came over to ask Willis what the 21st meant. She gave her usual answer. Marilyn White stopped her. There was total significance, Marilyn said. It was the day their son was supposed to be born.
Kahbran White, named after the writer Kahlil Gibran, actually arrived early on 1 August 1978, nearly two months ahead of schedule. Marilyn told the Wall Street Journal she didn’t know Maurice had put the date in the song until he first played it for her at home. She said it felt like “a secret message between us and our son”. When she asked if he’d remembered, he said he had.
So the night the song points to never happened the way anyone planned it. By 21 September 1978 the baby was about seven weeks old.
It’s worth being clear about what we actually know. This comes from Marilyn White, relayed through Willis, and Maurice never explained it publicly before he died in 2016. Willis says she worked with him for months and he never mentioned it. Some retellings go further and claim he wrote the whole song to celebrate the birth, but that’s more than Marilyn’s account says. Willis has said she spent decades disappointing people whose birthdays and weddings fell on the 21st.
From Filler Track to the Song of the Calendar
‘September’ came out on 18 November 1978. It reached number one on the R&B chart and number eight on the Hot 100, and it hit number three in the UK, where it first charted in December 1978. That was the peak of the disco boom, the same scene that kept Studio 54 packed every night, although Earth, Wind & Fire were always a lot more than a disco act.
Then it just kept growing. When Spotify ran the numbers in 2018, the song had about 384 million plays, roughly four times the total of ‘Boogie Wonderland’, even though that was the bigger hit at the time. Trackers now put it at around 2.4 billion.
Every 21 September the internet does the rest. In 2021 the song pulled about 1.5 million on-demand US streams on the day, 322 per cent up on the day before. Comedian Demi Adejuyigbe turned the date into an annual online event with a new, bigger video each year. According to Fortune, Prince even told his personal DJ to close every set with it.
In Britain it’s a Saturday night song. Spotify found weekend streams rose by about 17 per cent on average, peaking around 6pm on Saturdays, and in 2017 it was the most streamed 70s single in the UK with 17.5 million plays. Britain took its dance floors seriously long before that, as the Northern Soul scene shows.
The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2019. White re-recorded it as ‘December’ for a 2014 holiday album, one of his last sessions with the band, and he died in February 2016 after years of living with Parkinson’s disease. In 2025 CBS and the Recording Academy scheduled a Grammy Salute to the band from the Hollywood Bowl to air on 21 September itself, which was the only sensible date.
So next time it comes on at a wedding and somebody asks what ‘ba-de-ya’ means, you’ve got the full answer. It means nothing, it was almost swapped for real words at the last minute, and the date at the start was a private message that took 40 years to get out.
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