Will somebody wear me to the fair?

The singer here is a flower. That’s the conceit of “Les Fleurs,” and Minnie Riperton commits to it completely — wondering, in that impossible voice, whether somebody will wear her to the fair, while Charles Stepney raises a whole orchestra around her like a garden coming up in time-lapse.

The song reached her secondhand: pianist Ramsey Lewis recorded it first, on 1968’s Maiden Voyage. Two years later Stepney — who wrote it with Richard Rudolph, Riperton’s husband — produced and arranged her version as the opening track of her debut, Come to My Garden, with the string section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra behind her. The album barely sold, and then generations of listeners kept quietly correcting the record — most recently Jordan Peele, who let “Les Fleurs” bloom over the final minutes of Us, half a century on. Some seeds just take a while.