Marsha Ambrosius took to Twitter last week to remind everyone that it’s her voice at the end of Justin Timberlake's 2002 hit “Cry Me A River.”
The 42-year-old British singer, one-half of the defunct R&B duo Floetry, tweeted a video clip in which she points out the vocals she contributed to the song. She captioned it: “Cry me, cry me... cry me, cry meeeeeeeeee.”
Many fans reacted with surprise to her April 2nd tweet.
“Woooooooooow. I definitely thought it was him the whole time. Damn Sis,” one commented. Another replied: “I’ll never hear this song the same way again.. suddenly it sounds better.”
The singer’s tweet was sparked by one earlier in the day by Cynthia Francillon. “For a while in my teens, when JT sang in a high pitch, ‘Cry me, cry me’… I thought he was saying, ‘Grimy, grimy.’ Took a long time to uncover the truth. I’m not proud but I accept myself.”
In response, @dopegirlfresh pointed out “that’s not JT. it’s marsha ambrosius.”
Vernon Joran chimed in: “Justin Timberlake COASTED through the culture off them adlibs on the end of Cry Me and it WASNT. EVEN. HIM!!!”
Of course, it was never a secret that Ambrosius sang on “Cry Me A River” – which earned Timberlake a Grammy in 2004 for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance – although in the Justified liner notes her surname is misspelled “Ambroise.”
In 2014, she told The Los Angeles Times about how she ended up on the song. “I went into the booth, matched my vocal with Justin’s and did it a couple of times to get the feel, which is why barely anyone knows I’m on the song because we sound the same. I sang that ‘You don’t have to say, what you did’ [line], did the outro.”
Ambrosius also tweeted about her contributions to the song on Feb. 15, 2016 while watching the 58th Grammy Awards. “My first #Grammy win ‘Cry Me A River’ Justin Timberlake (that’s me on backgrounds and ad libs at the end),” she recalled. “I was sitting in the nose bleeds!”
(Ambrosius didn’t actually win a Grammy for the song.)
Here’s a sampling of some of the fresh reactions to the old news :