Marvin Gaye

1939–1984 · 45 years Specialist

The preacher's son who turned Motown into confession and protest

Portrait of Marvin Gaye — Photograph by Jim Britt, whose other (copyrighted) photos of Gaye from the same session—many of them in full color—can be seen at his websit — 1973 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Marvin Gaye was born in Washington, D.C., the son of a Pentecostal-style minister who preached in a robe and, by his sister's account, beat his children for infractions real and imagined from age seven into his teens. Singing in his father's church was the one part of that house that felt safe to him. He left for the Air Force at nineteen and was discharged early for insubordination, then sang doo-wop around Washington before a group called the Moonglows brought him to Chicago and then to Detroit, where in 1960 he signed with a small label called Tamla, part of a new company Berry Gordy was building called Motown.

Gaye spent his first Motown years wanting to be a jazz crooner and getting hits as an R&B singer instead, then built the label's most emotionally exposed catalog once he won creative control. His duets with Tammi Terrell, cut short by her 1967 on-stage collapse and 1970 death from a brain tumor, remain some of Motown's most covered songs. What's Going On, in 1971, turned soul music toward war, police violence, and pollution and became his first million-selling album. Let's Get It On followed in 1973; Here, My Dear, in 1978, turned an entire album into alimony payments for his first wife. After tax debt forced him into Belgian exile, he returned with Midnight Love in 1982, and its single "Sexual Healing" became the biggest hit of his career.

By the late 1970s Gaye owed the IRS more than 4.5 million dollars, was addicted to cocaine, and had moved to Ostend, Belgium, partly to avoid arrest. He came back with a hit record and, within eighteen months, was dead. On April 1, 1984, one day before his forty-fifth birthday, he intervened in a fight between his parents at their Los Angeles house; his father, Marvin Gay Sr., shot him twice, once through the heart, at close range. Gay Sr. was charged with murder, then allowed to plead to voluntary manslaughter after a brain tumor diagnosis, and received probation rather than prison. The man whose voice built a catalog of tenderness died at the hand of the man who had beaten him as a child.

More than 10,000 people filed past his casket in Los Angeles; his ashes went into the Pacific. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction came in 1987, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. What's Going On is now routinely named among the most significant American albums ever made, its arguments about police violence and the environment treated as prophecy rather than period commentary. The quiet storm and neo-soul genres that followed him, and the deliberately confessional record-as-diary move he made with Here, My Dear, both trace straight back to him. Motown remembers him as the artist who forced the label to let go.

Lifespan

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Marvin Gaye's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

What's Going On album
His first million-selling album, and Motown's first protest record 1971
Let's Get It On album 1973
Here, My Dear album
Written to satisfy a divorce settlement with royalties as alimony 1978
Midnight Love album
Recorded in Belgian tax exile 1982
Sexual Healing song
Two Grammy Awards; his best-selling single 1982

Life in brief

with age at each point

April 2, 1939 aged 0 Born in Washington, D.C.
1960 aged ~21 Signs with Tamla, part of Berry Gordy's new Motown label
October 14, 1967 aged 28 Tammi Terrell collapses on stage during a duet performance She died of a brain tumor in 1970.
1971 aged ~32 Releases What's Going On
1973 aged ~34 Releases Let's Get It On
1978 aged ~39 Releases Here, My Dear
February 1981 aged 41 Moves to Ostend, Belgium, as a tax exile
1982 aged ~43 Releases Midnight Love and "Sexual Healing"
April 1, 1984 aged 44 Shot and killed by his father in Los Angeles One day before his 45th birthday.