You've Got to Have Freedom

You've Got to Have Freedom is track 6 on Journey to the One, a double album released in 1980 on Theresa Records as TR 108/109. It runs 6:48 and Pharoah Sanders is the only writer and arranger credited; MusicBrainz also lists the alias You Gotta Have Freedom and counts 12 recordings of the work. The album was recorded in December 1979 in San Francisco with Sanders producing.

On this track Sanders plays tenor saxophone, Eddie Henderson flugelhorn, John Hicks piano, Ray Drummond bass and Idris Muhammad drums, with vocals by Dee Dee Dickerson, Bobby McFerrin, Vicki Randle and Ngoh Spencer. No source found gives the song's subject, a statement from Sanders, a chart position or a video.

Other versions

The Mosaic box The Complete Pharoah Sanders Theresa Recordings, MD7-282, includes a live 1981 disc where, in the Audiophile Audition reviewer's words, the song is a very wild ride with Hicks's piano keeping it from going off the rails, and a version from Ed Kelly's 1978 session that the reviewer says came well before the Theresa version.

Expansion Records issued the song as a 12-inch, EXPAND115, with Got to Give It Up on the other side, Sanders's version of the Marvin Gaye song from Love Will Find a Way, produced by Norman Connors in 1978; a dealer describes it as the track filling a whole side of a 12-inch for the first time, and lists a repress shipping from October 28, 2026, while a search snippet gave December 19, 2025. The upload is the audio from the Evidence label's VEVO channel; it is presumably the album recording, but the page does not say.