1979 Classic Ballad Won an Oscar for 'Best Original Song' 47 Years Ago
Of all the singers to land chart-topping songs in the '70s and '80s, Jennifer Warnes holds a particularly unique distinction: She performed more Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning songs than any other living artist in the history of the Academy Awards, from "One More Hour" to "Up Where We Belong" (a duet with Joe Cocker) to "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" (a duet with Bill Medley).
Her very first Oscar win, however, wasn't a duet at all. Written by David Shire and Norman Gimbel, "It Goes Like It Goes" was recorded by Warnes for the classic 1979 film Norma Rae. The song plays over the opening credits of the movie, which stars Sally Field as union activist Crystal Lee Sutton, and won the Oscar for Best Original Song that same year.
The lyrics are a perfect fit for the film's tale of working class struggles:
"Ain't no miracle being born / People doing it everyday / Ain't no miracle growing old
People just roll that way / So it goes like it goes / And the river flows / And time / It rolls right on / And maybe what's good gets a little bit better / And maybe what's bad gets gone"
As Warnes told Smashing Interviews in 2018, it wasn't necessarily a "conscious effort" on her part to become an "in-demand singer for film soundtracks."
"There are two ways of looking at that," Warnes explained. "One is, I never had a Colonel Parker management. I didn't have a manager. I had a plan. I pretty much followed, if a job was offered to me, and I liked the challenge and could learn something, I would take it irrespective of the pay because I was trying to be the best. I was trying to learn as much as I could possibly learn about singing, but there's no place to go to learn these things except through the jobs that are offered to you."
Jennifer Warnes got her second Oscar nomination for 'One More Hour' from the 'Ragtime' soundtrack
"Randy Newman gave me Ragtime because he knew my work," she continued. "We had performed together at the Troubadour. That was either the first one or the second one. I can't remember. Then there was the theme from Norma Rae. The people who were hiring me knew my work, so it wasn't planned at all. I was doing other things in between."
"It's more difficult for a woman in my era, as you probably know," Warnes added. "Very few women had the luxury of choosing what they wanted to do. They did what's coming down the road, and if it's in the road, it's yours to take. I did pretty much do that. If I got an offer and it was reasonable, I would just take it and figure out a way to make it work unless it was offensive, then I wouldn't take it. But I took singing in front, singing in back and singing behind the camera, anything that worked to learn how to do this better. So the career just came."
And what a career it's been.
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This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 11:00 PM.