One of Broadway’s most successful torch songs has been caught up in the middle of the race row that’s been skittering through showbiz in recent years. Dreamgirls’ crowd-pleaser And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going was due to be performed as part of The Best of the West End, an evening of musical numbers at the Royal Albert Hall, by white singer Mazz Murray.

But when the show’s producers approached Dreamgirls’ owners for permission to use the ballad in The Best of the West End, they were told that it wasn’t “appropriate” for a white woman to sing it.

In an unlikely twist, Queen guitarist Brian May has brought attention to the story by posting about it on his Instagram account, and calling the incident “an unpleasant new kind of race-based injustice”. In a summer when writer-director Robert Lepage’s Slav – a so-called “theatrical odyssey” in which white women play black slaves and sing their traditional songs – has been pulled from a Canadian festival after vehement protests, the question of who can performs material intended for, or created by, people of colour has never been more ripe.

But the row over this particular song overlooks its long history. Over the years, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going (or Telling for short) has taken on an almost totemic importance as the song that can break a new artist, helping a number of wildly talented women become accepted by showbusiness’ tight remits – and becoming a standard for less gifted TV show contestants.

Dreamgirls was the work of Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen, two white men who had been composing (Krieger) and writing (Eyen) for New York’s experimental off-off-Broadway scene since the Sixties. The pair first collaborated on 1975’s The Dirtiest Show in Town, and it was the performance of that show's leading lady Nell Carter that inspired the pair to create a new musical about black backup singers. In 1981, Dreamgirls – which followed the fortunes and fall-outs of a group loosely based on The Supremes in Civil Rights-era America – opened on Broadway with aplomb, earning 13 Tony Award nominations and winning six.

But the biggest star of the musical was Jennifer Holliday, a 20-year-old gospel singer. New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich called her rendition of Telling “one of the most powerful theatrical coups to be found in a Broadway musical since Ethel Merman sang Everything's Coming Up Roses at the end of Act I of Gypsy". “If the curtain didn't fall,” Rich wrote, “the audience would probably cheer Jennifer Holliday until dawn.”

Telling arrives at the climax of the first half of Dreamgirls. Effie, originally the lead singer of black girl group The Dreamettes, was usurped by her more attractive best friend Deena a few years ago, and the resentment has come to a head. Effie is convinced that Curtis, her lover and the group’s manager, is having an affair with Deena. Meanwhile, Effie’s negligent behaviour and bad attitude have seen her replaced with a new singer without her knowledge.

While Telling has a compelling melody, it’s the raw emotion it contains that explains its enduring appeal. Telling may be wrapped up in Motown soul and lush orchestration, but at its heart it offers the mournful, desperate howl of the underdog.

It was one of those hits that came relatively easy – at least according to Krieger’s version of events. (Eyen died of a heart attack aged 50 in 1991, having just finished the screenplay for the Dreamgirls film adaptation.) “We were in rehearsals and Tom Eyen gave me the lyric sheet,” Krieger told Broadway World in 2012. 

“I worked on that song for a couple of hours and came up with nothing,” he explained in 2007. “Then Ray Stark, who was rehearsing for the movie Annie, came into the room I was working and asked to use the phone. I said, ‘Great, go for it’. When he left the music just came right through me and wrote itself.”

Krieger has compared it the song to the tragic Italian opera Pagliacci. “You’ve got a lone figure who feels he’s been completely stabbed in the back and sings his heart out," he has said. "It also indicates a trajectory of the character that another shoe is gonna drop, and maybe that’s what people really relate to: the heroism of the outcast.”

Sadly, and fittingly, when Dreamgirls hit Broadway Holliday wasn’t in a particularly good place to become an overnight success. “It was a painful time,” she recalled in 2002. “I was an unhappy person. And my life reflected that.”

They knew Telling was special, but few expected it to achieve its own life beyond the musical: in a post-Beatlemania world, songs from stage shows were rarely released as records. But the rapturous reaction to Holliday’s desperate Effie saw Telling released as a single in 1982, a year after Dreamgirls opened. Frankie Crocker, a DJ on New York station WBLS, made it a regular track during his breakfast show, playing it “religiously, every morning”, according to Holliday.

The constant airplay helped the song to take off. At 21, Holliday had topped the Hot Black Singles Billboard chart (the equivalent of today’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart) as Telling spread across the country. Weeks earlier, she had won the 1982 Tony Award for best leading actress in a musical for her portrayal of Effie – she also stole the ceremony with a storming rendition of the song. Six months later, Holliday beat soul heavyweights Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Patrice Rushen, Donna Summer and Deniece Williams to win the Grammy Award for best female R&B vocal performance – also for Telling, while as a Best New Artist nominee.

Behind the scenes, Holliday was struggling. “Success is overwhelming,” she recalled. “I became very lonely, food became my best friend, my lover and everything else.” She was also aware that, in spite of her evident vocal prowess, she didn’t fit the pop star mould – mostly because her label refused to make music videos to back up her subsequent releases. “My record company told me they were not going to spend a dime on me because I was awkward-looking, overweight and unmarketable," she told Billboard. Holliday’s follow-up records failed to gain traction, and she struggled with depression, attempting suicide in 1990. Following weight-loss surgery, she made a comeback in the Nineties, and continues to perform today.

In 2005, another Jennifer was cast as Effie in the film adaptation: Jennifer Hudson, a former cruise ship singer who, like Holliday, had grown up singing gospel and had found some success thanks to her shockingly premature exit on American Idol in 2004. Telling was her breakthrough. As The New York Observer said of Telling, upon Dreamgirls’ release: “five mellifluous, molto vibrato minutes that have suddenly catapulted Ms Hudson... into the position of front-runner for the best supporting actress Oscar". When she won the Oscar, it brought the kind of pipedream success that Hudson still struggled to understand two years later: “It’s like I came in through the back door,” she told The New York Times. “Even I don’t understand it. I have to laugh at myself, like, I won an Academy Award? I’m an actress, almost before being a singer, when that’s almost all I’ve ever known?”

The difference between Holliday and Hudson is that the latter came to fame in the age of reality television and the internet. Hudson’s version of Telling not only landed her a chart hit and an Oscar, but has also been watched more than 24 million times on YouTube. Suddenly, Telling became the go-to song for aspiring singers who were entering TV singing competitions and hoping to change their lives just as Hudson had – and few considered the fact the song had been written for an African-American woman to sing.

In fact, until relatively recently, Telling was the audition number chosen by a few successful TV talent show contestants. Even before Hudson had won the Oscar, Bianca Ryan – an 11-year-old from Philadelphia who has described herself as of “mostly” Irish heritage – won America’s Got Talent 2006 after auditioning with Telling. Nineties R&B star Brandy was so impressed she gave Ryan a standing ovation halfway through the song.

In 2009, wedding singer-turned-boyband-reject Danyl Johnson gave such a stirring version of the song that it put Hudson’s versions into the UK charts. In 2012, Filipino-American singer Jessica Sanchez was joined by Holliday in the American Idol finale to sing Telling. The next year, Dani Im, an Australian singer of Korean descent, won the country’s X Factor with her version – before going on to represent Australia in the Eurovision Song Contest. She wasn’t alone: also in 2013, white former prison guard Sam Bailey was joined by Nicole Scherzinger to sing Telling before she won The X Factor. Even as recently as last year, Telling was a step on the path to success for Britain’s Got Talent contestant Sarah Ikumu, earning her the Golden Buzzer mid-song.

And while TV talent contests would suggest that Telling is a song for everybody (even Krieger seemed amused at the song’s endless adoption by pop star hopefuls, quipping “that song certainly has won a lot of talent contests for people”), a backlash specifically against white people singing it has been simmering online for years. In 2013, Tyler Coates of Flavorwire published a sarcastic compilation of “White Women Singing ‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going’”.

Three years earlier Naomi Shure, otherwise known as Miss Lake Dardanelle, went viral for all the wrong reasons when she sang Telling as part of the Miss Arkansas pageant. “This is whiter than Springsteen and Courtney Cox dancing in the dark.  This is a hate crime,” wrote one commenter when the footage appeared on YouTube.

But Telling’s power remains seemingly unimpeachable on the stage. In 2009, Glee’s Amber Riley – long a fan favourite among viewers – gave one of the stand-out performances of the TV school drama with Telling. By 2017, she had become the most talked-about aspect of Dreamgirl’s long-awaited arrival in the West End. Riley, who also auditioned for American Idol but was turned down by producers, performed Telling at the Olivier Awards in London in December, where she later won the award for Best Actress in a Musical. Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda was in the crowd, and congratulated her on Twitter. Where Holliday and Hudson led before her, so Riley continues. As for Telling, that song’s not going.