Minnie Riperton was a legend long before her daughter was

Minnie Riperton was working as a secretary at Chess Records in Chicago when Charles Stepney heard her voice and pulled her into the studio.

Stepney was a self taught classical arranger who couldn't afford Juilliard as a teenager, so he bagged groceries, saved his money, and ordered every textbook a Juilliard student would use. He taught himself from those books, and what he built from that foundation was something entirely his own.

His daughter described his approach this way: he would take the genre of rhythm and blues or blues and put it within the context of a classical piece, but the context was always the same, storytelling. He drew from Debussy and Stravinsky and rooted it all in gospel and Chicago soul.

What you hear on Come to My Garden is exactly that. Minnie had a five octave vocal range and could have overwhelmed every track on this album, but Stepney directed her to hold back, to whisper where other singers would push, to let the orchestral arrangements breathe around her voice rather than compete with it.

Maurice White on drums before he founded Earth, Wind and Fire. Phil Upchurch on guitar. Ramsey Lewis on piano. Recorded over three days at Ter Mar Studios in Chicago in 1969. The album peaked at 160 on the Billboard 200. Almost nobody heard it.

Stevie Wonder said he wore out so many copies of this record he lost count.

Then the diggers found it. Black Sheep sampled Les Fleurs in 1991. Smif-n-Wessun pulled from Only When I'm Dreaming in 1995. Nas used Rainy Day in Centerville in 2006. Each one finding something different inside the space Stepney left in the arrangement.

Stepney died suddenly of a heart attack in 1976 at 45. Minnie was diagnosed with breast cancer that same year and died on July 12, 1979 at 31. They never made another record together.

This is the only document of what they sounded like in a room together.