“I was in the car and I was screaming out loud.”
That’s how the man who wrote “Never Can Say Goodbye” has described hearing the Jackson 5’s version of his song for the first time, sitting in his car. He wasn’t a Motown star. He was a young actor from Broadway who wrote songs on the side and was trying hard to sell them.
He’s said the song came from a real heartbreak. He wanted to say goodbye to someone, but he couldn’t, because he still loved her too much.
In 1970 he took his songs to Motown’s office in Los Angeles. The walls there were thin. A producer working in the room next door reportedly heard the melody and knew right away it was a hit. He wanted to record it with the Jackson 5, and he didn’t want to wait. The story goes that it was cut that same night.
The producer gave the slow ballad a beat that Michael could move to and added strings. Then Motown boss Berry Gordy asked for part of the melody to be rewritten. The songwriter did it with young Michael right there in the room, so Michael could learn the new part on the spot. “He was young, but he was professional,” he later said.
The Jackson 5 record that went to No. 2
“Never Can Say Goodbye” came out in March 1971. It went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, held back only by “Joy to the World.” Michael was 12, singing a grown-up song about not being able to let go, and somehow he made you believe every word.
Here’s Michael singing it on TV that same year.
Young Michael sings it on TV in 1971
The song didn’t stop with the Jackson 5. Isaac Hayes recorded it, and later Gloria Gaynor turned it into a dance floor hit. Its writer went back to Motown too and gave the brothers another song, “Lookin’ Through the Windows,” in 1972.
But his own career went somewhere else entirely.
The writer was Clifton Davis. A few years later he was starring in his own TV comedy, “That’s My Mama.” Then, from 1986 to 1991, he played Reverend Reuben Gregory, the pastor on NBC’s “Amen,” opposite Sherman Hemsley. Week after week, viewers watched him lead a church on TV.
And off camera, he became a minister for real, just like his own father, a Baptist preacher.
He never stopped loving that song, either. In 2021 he put out his own album named after it. And in 2025, at 80, he sang “Never Can Say Goodbye” himself on the CBS soap “Beyond the Gates.” “It’s quite amazing to think I wrote this song way, way back,” he said.