Valerie Simpson's songs are known around the world, but her story started out in the Bronx, and it's always been a New York story. NY1's Budd Mishkin filed the following report.

Are words really necessary here? An explanation why a song is beautiful, or how it was created some 50 years ago? No. But Valerie Simpson wrote the music for "Your Precious Love," so if anyone can explain, she can.

"Certain songs, I feel like I was inspired from I know not where. But that's the muse that you want to come visit," she says.

"When you get it, and when it happens, it's like magic."

An afternoon spent with Valerie Simpson at her East Side home is filled with memories,

Mishkin: Good outfits.
Simpson: Don’t you like these outfits?
Mishkin: Good outfits.
Simpson: Timeless, don’t you think?
Mishkin: Good outfits.

There are stories aplenty about her late husband and songwriting collaborator, Nicklas Ashford.

Simpson: It was a Valentine's Day, he gave that to me, and I was so annoyed with him. I was like, 'How come you're leaving me here at this restaurant?' He wanted to put this picture up so when I walked into the house, I would see it, and I was just fussing and fussing and fussing, and when I walked in, boom, there it was.
Mishkin: This is a Valentine's Day present?
Simpson: Yeah.
Mishkin: Please don't let my wife know about this.
Simpson: (laughs)

And there is music, and the chance to play music everywhere.

Simpson: We have a studio on the very top floor, and there's a big grand up there, and there's another one on the floor above, a smaller thing,
Mishkin: So pianos are around?
Simpson: Oh yeah. You never know when the spirit's going to hit. You want to be ready.

Sometimes you'll find her at Ashford and Simpson's Sugar Bar, the restaurant she and her husband opened in 1996.

Valerie Simpson will forever best be known as part of the songwriting duo Ashford and Simpson, writing songs for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, for Diana Ross, and for Ashford and Simpson.

Nicklas Ashford died in 2011. Simpson says thinking of her husband is not sad, but a joyous thing. But the meaning of his lyrics has changed.

"I now have this new reality," she says. "So when I say 'I've got your picture hanging on the wall/But it can't see or come to me when I call your name/I realize it's just a picture in a frame/Ain't nothing like the real thing baby.' You know, that’s got a whole other meaning now."

Simpson was still a teenager when she started writing songs with Ashford, who'd moved to New York to become a dancer. They wrote many of their best-known love songs before they were a couple.

Ashford was actually the photographer at Simpson's first wedding. They worked together for almost a decade before getting involved romantically, marrying in 1974. 

"Come to know somebody, come to like them, they see you at your best, they see you at your worst, and they still like you," she says. "And the fact that when the romance did come, that there was no pretense. It was nothing to, I didn't have to put on and try to become, you know. It was too late for all of that."

Their process of writing songs together continued unimpeded.

"You want the chords to be colorful. You want it not to be the usual [plays melody], so you know, you want to put some color in the chords," Simpson says. "And sometimes, you know, I would be working with him, and he was like, 'You need some color. You need some oranges, purples. You need some, you know?' I'm like, 'What?' 'Hey, everything out your mouth ain't golden, you know what I'm saying?' [laughter]."

Valerie Simpson's songs have taken her around the world. No memory is perhaps more vivid than meeting Nelson Mandela. But her journey started on Jackson Avenue in the Bronx.

"Junior High School 22, which was like, we were the first class that integrated that school, so we were the first black students that got a chance to get this better education, and we felt a great responsibility, you know," she says. "I felt like I was holding up the whole black race at the time."

She went to Morris High School and desperately wanted to get out of the Bronx. Music would be her ticket, despite her family's apprehension.

"People look at you like you've kind of lost a little something in the head, because nobody in my family had ever explored music and been successful," Simpson says.

It wasn't long before she was successful. Initially, she sang jingles.

Simpson: I did everything. Budweiser, "When you've said Bud, you've said it all." "Sometimes you feel like a nut."
Mishkin: "Sometimes you don't."
Simpson: "Sometimes you don't."

"I was making so much money as a jingle singer that I wasn't paying attention to the writing. That was early Motown days," Simpson says. "And so Nick warned me, he says, 'Well, you have to make a decision here.'"

She decided to get serious about song writing, and the hits soon started flowing.

Ashford and Simpson signed a contract with Motown that gave them a writers' share, but they owned none of the publishing.

"After seven years - seven wonderful years, I might add - we realized it was time now to own everything, if possible. So we left Motown and started our own publishing company," Simpson says. "So from then on, you know, we got 100 percent. But you know, 50 percent of those songs is a wonderful thing."

The music she's created has lasted. It has legs. She hears it around the corner.

"You would think after all these years, I'd be used to it," Simpson says, laughing. "But I still get that same tingle I got the very first, you know, the first time I heard it."

And around the world.

"We went to Africa, and they were, like, enthralled with this song, 'Mighty, Mighty Love,' that we—we had never sung 'Mighty, Mighty Love.' I didn't even know how it went anymore. But it was a huge hit. We had to learn 'Mighty, Mighty Love,'" Simpson says.

Valerie Simpson has two grown daughters, the Sugar Bar and her pianos. She says she is not sitting around trying to write another "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" or "I'm Every Woman," as she puts it, "another one like the other one."

"It's like couture, you know. It's not off the rack, you know. It's not just like any old thing. You want it to fit," she says.

Much has changed since the death of her husband and songwriting partner in 2011, but the beauty of writing a song remains the same.

"The goosebumps I get are still the same. When I hit it and it's wonderful, and I say, 'Oh yeah, this is'—if I'm moving myself, then I have a chance of moving somebody else," Simpson says.

"I'm still hoping that the muse will step by and stop down and give me something I haven't even done yet."