India's music icon Lata Mangeshkar had sung more than 30000 songs in her glittering career spanning over seven decades. Apart from singing in Hindi and Marathi she is also credited with producing innumerable classics with her magical voice in almost all regional languages. However, very few people would be knowing that the Nightingale of Indian cinema also had recorded an English song, albeit it was not recorded for any movie or album.
At the request of Grammy Award winner Anne Murray in Canada, Lata weaved her magic singing Anne's hit song, “You Needed Me”. The melody queen, who was 55 years of age at the time, decided to fulfill the request from Anne to sing her song during the concert in Toronto which was organized to benefit the United Way of Canada.
Lata sang “You Needed Me” with such grace and mellifluousness that the audience could not stop expressing their admiration and burst out giving a big hand to the music legend. The local orchestra continued to play the music and Lataji went to deliver one of her rarest performances in English. Listen to the audio here.
Interestingly, even at the age of 55 years, she was ready to learn something new, experiment, and contribute to music in whichever way possible. She regularly sang in concerts meant for charity. It is a known fact that Lataji had a great fondness for cricket and had good bonding with leading cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Gavaskar.
So when India won the World Cup in 1983 for the first time, she did a concert to raise money for the world cup winning team. At that time BCCI was not rolling in money as it is today, but Lataji wanted the players to be rewarded for their achievement. That is why she raised Rs 20 lakh through a concert along with her brother Hridayanath Mangeshkar and thus each one of the players from the team took home Rs 1 lakh.