- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Eventually, over the years, I began to realize that Marvin Gaye was one of the greatest recording artists of the entire era.
Marvin Gaye – Every Great Motown Hit of Marvin Gaye (1983): There were so many talented African American musicians who were active in the 1960’s and 1970’s that, at least for me, it was hard to keep up with all of them and still have a finger on the pulse of rock music at the same time. Besides the three great centers of R&B music in those days that I can identify – Motown Records, Atlantic/Stax Records, and Philadelphia International Records – many other smaller labels also created a large number of hit songs in this time period. Then there were the numerous independent labels and the homegrown recordings that resulted in few if any hits. Collectively, this latter category of music has become known as “Northern Soul”; in some quarters (certainly England), Northern Soul music is just as revered as that of the hitmakers.
I remember hearing song after song by Marvin Gaye when I was growing up, and many of them registered; mostly though, I was concentrating on the singing groups that appeared on most of the torrent of records that was coming out of “Hitsville U.S.A.”. But my ears perked up when I heard several duets by Marvin Gaye with Tammi Terrell (four are included in this collection); although duets were a staple of R&B music in years past, Motown Records wasn’t doing too much of that. Then, I began hearing socially conscious songs also – notably “What’s Going On”, but also “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” – and Motown wasn’t releasing many songs like that either. All three of those songs are also on this album. In early May 2021, CNN broadcast a documentary about “What’s Going On” and its continuing relevance to our nation today, called What’s Going On: Marvin Gaye’s Anthem for the Ages. Eventually, the other pieces began falling into place in my mind, and I began to realize that Marvin Gaye was one of the greatest recording artists of the entire era. For starters, Marvin Gaye’s recording of “I Heard it through the Grapevine” is the largest selling hit song that Motown Records ever released. At the time, Gladys Knight and the Pips held that record with their version of the same song. The first recording made of “I Heard it through the Grapevine” was by another landmark Motown group, the Miracles (Smokey Robinson’s band). As if that were not enough, Creedence Clearwater Revival included an 11-minute version of “I Heard it through the Grapevine” on their album Cosmo’s Factory (1970); and the California raisin growers created a series of wildly popular TV commercials in the mid to late 1980’s featuring “I Heard it through the Grapevine” as sung by the California Raisins, a Claymation R&B group featuring lead vocals by Buddy Miles. And of course, there are Marvin Gaye’s mainstream soul records that never get old, like “How Sweet it is (to be Loved by You)”, “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby”, “Let’s Get it On”, etc. About the only Marvin Gaye hit that I remember that is not on this album is “Sexual Healing”, but I was always a little ambivalent about that one anyway.