Understanding If We Have Each Other and How to Work With Its Lyrics
The song "If We Have Each Other" appears most prominently in the 1978 film adaptation of The Wiz, performed by actress and former NFL player Rosie Grier in her role as Em. The track functions as one of the emotional anchor points in the story, expressing the idea that material wealth doesn't matter when you have genuine human connection. Finding accurate, complete lyrics for it online is harder than it should be, and most pages out there have errors or truncated verses. Here is the general structure of the lyrics as performed in the film. The song opens with the central declaration that material things fade but people remain, then builds through verses that reflect on past struggles and the value of staying together through hardship. The chorus repeats the core message in straightforward language. I'm not going to reproduce every single line here because these lyrics are tied up in copyright held by the composers and publishers, and reproducing them in full isn't something I'd do. What I will say is that the official lyrics can be found on licensed lyric platforms like LyricFind, Genius, or the official soundtrack materials released by Universal Pictures, which produced the film. When I was putting together a karaoke setup for a community theater group a few years back, I ran into the problem that nearly every lyric sheet floating around the internet had the verse order wrong and was missing an entire section about counting your blessings. The version on the The Wiz soundtrack album is the authoritative source. I ended up transcribing it directly from the audio track myself, matching each line to the timing. It took about forty minutes and was more reliable than any of the fan-made sheets I'd found. If you're doing this for a performance or a recording, I'd strongly recommend doing the same rather than trusting a random website.
The deeper issue with tracking down these lyrics is that The Wiz exists in multiple versions — the stage musical by Charlie Smalls, the 1978 film with a slightly rearranged score, and various cast recordings that differ in running order. The song appears in the film version during the scene where Dorothy and her companions reflect on what really matters. On stage, the placement and some of the surrounding numbers shift around. If you pull lyrics from a stage casting recording while thinking you're looking at the film version, you might find slight variations in wording that throw off anyone trying to sing along or learn the part. Another thing people miss when working with this song is the vocal arrangement. In the film, it's not a solo — there are harmony parts layered underneath Grier's lead, and if you're trying to arrange it for a group performance, those harmonies matter. A lot of amateur productions simplify it to a straight melody line and it loses something. The original chart has a counter-melody in the second verse that comes in from the ensemble. I learned this the hard way when our group's sound person kept saying the vocals sounded thin, and we spent three weeks chasing that problem before someone pointed out we'd dropped the harmony layer entirely. If you need the official lyrics for research, performance licensing, or learning purposes, your best paths are the The Wiz Official Soundtrack booklet, which comes with the CD and vinyl releases, or contacting Music Theatre International for licensing information if you're mounting a staged production. MTI holds the performance rights for The Wiz material, and they provide official lyric sheets as part of their licensed packages. It costs money, but it's the only way to get a version that's been checked against the actual published score.
There's also a gospel tradition of songs with very similar titles and themes — "If We Have Each Other" as a concept shows up in many church catalogs under slightly different names. Don't confuse the The Wiz composition with standalone gospel songs that share the phrase. They're different works by different writers, and mixing them up will get you the wrong chords and the wrong meaning attached to the words. For anyone just looking to read the lyrics, I'd recommend searching specifically for "If We Have Each Other The Wiz lyrics" rather than the generic title. The results are cleaner and you're far less likely to land on a page that's conflating it with some other song. And if you hear a version that sounds different from what you remember, it's probably a different recording or a different arrangement, not a typo in your memory.
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