Song 174B: “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Part Two, “It Takes Two”
Andrew Hickey
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we're looking at the career of Marvin Gaye from 1963 through 1970, as…
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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we’re looking at the career of Marvin Gaye from 1963 through 1970, as well as his duet partners Mary Wells, Kim Weston, and Tammi Terrell, whose tragically short life comes with a great many content warnings.

Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly

And if you just can’t get enough of me talking, I’ve also guested this week, with Tilt and Gary from The Sitcom Club, on our friend Tyler’s podcast Goon Pod, talking about the 1974 film Man About The House.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

Resources

As usual I have put together two Mixclouds containing the songs from this episode and the previous one. Part one, part two.

For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources:

Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.

To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography.

Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown.

I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown.

The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history.

Motown: The Golden Years is another Motown encyclopaedia.

And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles.

For information on Marvin Gaye, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz and Steve Turner’s Trouble Man: The Life and Death of Marvin Gaye. I’ve also used information on Tammi Terrell’s relationship with David Ruffin from Ain’t Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky,

I’ve also referred to interviews with Whitfield and Strong archived at rocksbackpages.com , notably “The Norman Whitfield interview”, John Abbey, Blues & Soul, 1 February 1977

This box set contains all of Marvin Gaye’s studio albums released between 1966 and 1970, including the duet albums with Kim Weston and Tammi Terrell. But the best way to hear Motown hits is in the context of other Motown hits. This five-CD box set contains the first five in the Motown Chartbusters series of British compilations. The Pips’ version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” is on disc 2, while Marvin Gaye’s is on disc 3, which is famously generally considered one of the best single-disc various artists compilations ever.

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Transcript

Before we start, this episode will contain discussion of intimate-partner violence, drug abuse, cancer, and early death. If you find those topics upsetting, you might want to look at the transcript rather than listen to the episode.

Last episode, two weeks ago, we looked at the careers of Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong, and Gladys Knight, and the saga that led to the release of the first version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” to be issued.

But of course, that first version released is not now the version that most people are familiar with, and so in this second part of our look at the song, we’re going to turn to Marvin Gaye and look at his career throughout the 60s.

Now, we’ve already done one episode on Gaye, on the song “Hitch-Hike”, but that was several years ago and people would be forgiven for not remembering that. So, as a brief recap, Marvin Gaye was someone whose whole life — and, as we’ll see in a future episode, his eventual death — was defined by a confrontational relationship with his father, a man who in many ways he was very like, but who he wanted desperately to be as different as possible from.

And that confrontational relationship led him to find a series of substitute father figures in his life, who he would then rebel against, giving him a reputation as, as his first hit had it, a “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”.

Gaye had originally been discovered by Harvey Fuqua, who had got him into his backing group as a member of the Moonglows, but when Fuqua started working for Motown, Gaye came with him, and soon became a general utility person at Motown, doing everything from sweeping the floor to writing songs to playing the drums — he both co-wrote and played on “Beechwood 45-789” by the Marvelettes, for example:

[Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Beechwood 45-789”]

Of course, Gaye was primarily a singer, but he had disagreements about what kind of singer he was going to be with his father figure at Motown, Berry Gordy — disagreements of a kind that would not normally be allowed by a Motown performer, but Marvin Gaye, even before he had any hits, was one of the small privileged core of people who were immune to Gordy’s disapproval. That core basically consisted of Smokey Robinson, who was Gordy’s right-hand man, Harvey Fuqua, who was married to Gordy’s sister Gwen, and Gaye — who was dating, and soon to marry, Gordy’s other sister Anna.

This protection allowed Gaye to spend a good chunk of his early career defying Gordy and going for his own artistic vision — and for once, that was a very bad choice.

In a lot of the episodes around Motown, particularly this one and last one, we talk about Gordy making bad decisions about his artists and pushing them in bad directions or thwarting their artistic ambitions. But at the same time, there is a *reason* Gordy became the most successful and influential Black music executive of the twentieth century, and his instincts were often right.

And in the case of Marvin Gaye, their disagreement was precisely the opposite of the normal one that Gordy had with his artists. Many Motown acts resented — or at least have said later that they resented — Gordy’s attempts to push them into a showbiz mainstream that was already dying, to play at the Copacabana and sing show tunes. They wanted to be soul or R&B singers and thought that was what they were good at.

Marvin Gaye was the opposite. Everyone could tell that this man was one of the greatest R&B singers of his generation, and clearly cut out to be a major soul star. It was in his writing, his vocals, everything. This was a man who could be the next Sam Cooke or Ray Charles or Clyde McPhatter. Everyone could tell that — except Marvin Gaye. Who wanted desperately to be Perry Como.

Gordy humoured him for a while, but eventually Gaye bowed to pressure and started actually making soul records, and started having massive R&B hits that crossed over slightly to the pop charts. From the release of “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” in 1962, Gaye would become one of the most consistent R&B hitmakers of his generation, with almost everything he released for the next twenty years making the R&B charts, and the majority making the top ten or better.

But pop success was, initially, more sporadic, and while Gaye never quite gave up on his ambitions to be a crooner, he realised that there was also a sense of pride to be had in appealing to Black audiences, and he started to reinvent himself in his own mind as an authentic R&B singer.

“Stubborn Kind of Fellow”, his first big R&B hit, didn’t make the pop top forty, but “Hitch-Hike”, his second, made number thirty. But as we heard in the last episode, it was the song after that, “Pride and Joy”, that became his first big crossover success:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”]

Sung with Martha and the Vandellas on backing vocals, and co-written by Gaye, Mickey Stevenson, and new writer Norman Whitfield, that became a top ten pop hit, and established Gaye as Motown’s biggest male solo star.

The song was a personal one for Gaye, being written about Anna Gordy, who he married two months after the song came out and with whom, at least for a time, he was very happy. But despite being a big hit, it was his last collaboration for the time with Stevenson, at least on his own records.

One of Gaye’s big bones of contention with Motown was the way he felt he was shuffled around from producer to producer, and his next record would have a different production team and different backing vocalists. Instead of Mickey Stevenson, he had Holland, Dozier, and Holland, still a new team, but one who had written a few hits already, most notably “Heatwave”. And instead of Martha and the Vandellas, who were now starting to have enough hits themselves that being other people’s backing vocalists was a waste of their talents, he had the Supremes.

The song in question, “Can I Get a Witness?” was by far the most explicitly gospel-influenced record that Gaye had made up to that point, being based as it was on a phrase often used in Black Pentecostal churches:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Can I Get a Witness?”]

That didn’t do quite as well as “Pride and Joy” on the pop charts — it was a little too Black for white tastes at that point, and so only reached number twenty-two — but it made number three on the R&B charts, and it was a hugely influential record, with echoes of its chord sequence appearing in all sorts of places.

It was also covered almost straight away by the Rolling Stones, who seem to have picked up on another influence in the song, which Lamont Dozier has said was inspired by Jimmy Reed, one of their blues heroes:

[Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Can I Get a Witness”]

Gaye was, at the time, not very happy with Holland, Dozier, and Holland because they made him sing in a higher key than he was comfortable with, but he later admitted that their pushing him to hit higher notes turned him into a much better, more agile, singer than he had been previously. They would push him to do take after take, and he talked later about the sound they wanted, saying “I had to sing harshly but learn not to tear my throat out. Sometimes I didn’t make it. Holland and Dozier needed both roughness and softness in their music. They cut the songs very high and at times it was hard for me to control my voice.”

Holland, Dozier, and Holland would write and produce much of Gaye’s material for the next couple of years, but while Gaye was Motown’s biggest male solo star, as 1963 turned into 1964 both they, and Motown generally, were more concerned with groups rather than solo artists.

Partly as a result of the Beatles hitting America, people were no longer as interested in solo performers, and while Holland, Dozier, and Holland continued to work with Gaye, when the careers of both the Supremes and the Four Tops started to take off, Gaye was rather relegated in their priorities.

But while the public were more interested in groups, the groups themselves were often more interested in solo performers. Just before the Beatles came to America, George Harrison and Ringo Starr contributed this to the BBC radio show Public Ear:

[Excerpt: George Harrison and Ringo Starr talking about Motown ]

None of the three artists that Harrison mentioned there had had much success in the UK, where Motown wouldn’t properly break through until summer 1964, in large part because of the Beatles. Mary Wells, the other solo performer Harrison mentioned, was at this time Motown’s biggest solo star, and she was the one who got the biggest boost from the Beatles’ support.

Wells was, in fact, Motown’s first major star, though her career was on a bit of a downturn by the end of 1963. As a teenager, she had an unusual level of ambition, and after at first wanting to become a scientist she had decided she wanted to be a songwriter. Aged seventeen, she had written a song that she wanted Jackie Wilson to perform, and had tracked down Berry Gordy at a nightclub because she knew that he wrote for Wilson. Gordy had asked her to sing the song for him, mostly just to get rid of her and get her to leave him alone, but had actually been impressed.

Rather than giving the song to Wilson though, he had signed Wells to a contract as a performer, and had taken her into the studio to release what ended up being the third single to come out on the Motown label. Hearing something in her voice, Gordy pushed her to do eleven takes of that first song, leading to a roughness in her vocal that was quite unlike her natural sound:

[Excerpt: Mary Wells, “Bye Bye Baby”]

That record was a milestone, because it was the first Motown release to become a hit without being picked up for distribution by another, bigger, label. It made the top five on the R&B chart and the top fifty on the pop chart, but later releases did even better, with Smokey Robinson writing three pop top ten hits in a row for her, some of his best early work like “You Beat Me to the Punch”:

[Excerpt: Mary Wells, “You Beat Me to the Punch”]

Wells was so popular that on the first Motortown Revue tour at the end of 1962, the tour where, as we learned in the last episode on Marvin Gaye he learned to have any stage presence at all, she was the headliner.

But after those three top ten hits, her career started to decline. Her first husband, a failed singer named Herman Griffin who had himself recorded for Motown, had insisted on becoming her manager, and on “conducting” her band on stage, despite not actually knowing anything about conducting, and spending most of the performances showing off doing backflips. He was increasingly making demands on Motown, and while she was having hits, after those three top ten hits her next three singles made number fifteen, number forty, and number twenty-two — though the latter of those was bigger than it sounds as the B-side also charted at number twenty-nine.

Wells’ career was starting to slow down at the same time Gaye’s was starting to rise, and so it made sense to put the two of them together, to give each other an extra push — especially since as solo singers were starting to become less popular, finding a way to package them as a group of sorts was good business sense.

Marvin and Mary recorded an album of duets, and a single was released from it, with the nominal A-side being a song by Clarence Paul, Mickey Stevenson, Motown executive Barney Ales and session musician Dave Hamilton, “Once Upon a Time”, but which the DJs soon flipped for its B-side, a song by Paul and Stevenson called “What’s the Matter with You Baby?”:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells, “What’s the Matter with You Baby?”]

Both sides of the single charted in the top twenty, and that could have been the start of a great career for Marvin and Mary as a duo, had Mary Wells not got too big too fast. Between the duets album being recorded and released, she put out another single which Smokey Robinson had written for her, and that made number one:

[Excerpt: Mary Wells, “My Guy”]

Wells had by this point divorced her first husband, and things were going great for her. “My Guy” sold a million copies, and it was also one of the first Motown records to make a really big breakthrough in the UK, making the top five. The Beatles asked her to be one of their support acts on a UK tour, and it looked like she was on her way to being a megastar.

But Wells was deeply dissatisfied with her experience at Motown. She didn’t like that the Supremes were getting more promotion than she was, she didn’t like the low royalty rates, and she also wanted to be a film star. She’d also figured out that her contract with Motown might not be valid, as she’d been under twenty-one when she signed it. She announced that she was going to quit Motown on her twenty-first birthday, and sign with Twentieth Century Fox records instead, as they were going to put her in films.

She also threatened a lawsuit against Motown, saying that money from her records had been used to cross-promote other acts like the Supremes. Eventually a deal was struck, Motown paid Wells off with a lump sum but in return she waived all her future royalties from her Motown tracks, and she signed to Twentieth Century Fox for an advance I’ve variously seen reported as two hundred thousand dollars and half a million dollars.

Unfortunately for her, without the Motown apparatus behind her she quickly sank into oblivion, and after one final top forty hit on her new label, she would never again have any real success — and Fox had been lying to her about the film career. Before her death from cancer in 1992 she had to sell her home as at that point she had no health insurance, though in her last months some of her old celebrity friends came forward to help her out financially.

Wells sadly went from being Motown’s biggest shining light to being a warning to anyone else who thought they were bigger than Motown, a stick used to keep everyone else in line.

But it was very difficult to keep Marvin Gaye in line. While the other Motown stars were made to take dancing lessons with Cholly Atkins, singing lessons from Maurice King, and deportment lessons from Maxine Powell, Gaye refused to get involved with these people. Indeed, he wanted less and less to do with the performance side of things, as opposed to recording.

Gaye was suffering from terrible stagefright, to the point that on one occasion Gordy came to see him perform at a nightclub but Gaye simply refused to go on stage because he was too scared. Gordy ended up going backstage and punching him in the face — which given that Gordy was a former professional boxer was not a small matter. Gaye did the show.

Gaye was never a comfortable live performer, but he managed to be popular as a live act simply because of the power of his voice — even when, as he invariably did, he included one of the standards that he recorded on such unsuccessful albums as Hello Broadway and A Tribute to the Great Nat “King” Cole, which he continued recording through to the end of 1965:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “The Days of Wine and Roses (Live)”]

But Motown could tolerate Gaye’s distaste for live performance, and his attitude, and his general rebelliousness, because he could deliver the goods when he needed to. Lamont Dozier would tell the story of Gaye coming into a session very late, still carrying his golf clubs because he’d been playing golf while everyone in the studio was waiting for him. They played him the backing track with Eddie Holland’s guide vocal, and he interrupted it part way through to complain that once again they’d put the track into a key that was too high for him.

They put the track back to the beginning, he listened to the song uninterrupted once, then went up to the mic and cut a single take. He then picked up his golf bag and started to walk out. Brian Holland called out to him saying “We haven’t even listened back to the tape yet!” and Gaye just laughed, said “You’ve got what you need”, and walked out.

But the thing is, they *had* got what they needed:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “How Sweet It Is”]

That became Gaye’s biggest hit to that point, making number six on the charts, and that success temporarily derailed another plan. While Mary Wells had left the label, the idea of pairing Gaye as a duet artist had the Motown staff excited, and it’s popularly believed that a lot of singers were considered as partners for him, including Brenda Holloway and Carolyn Crawford. He had even recorded with another singer, Oma Heard, who was signed to Motown’s West Coast branch, though that material wasn’t released until much later:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Oma Heard, “Your Kiss Kiss”]

The singer they hit on to be Gaye’s duet partner was born Agatha Weston, and had got her start as a gospel singer with the group The Wright Specials. She’d been recommended to Motown by a cousin of the Holland brothers, and she’d been renamed Kim Weston and soon married Mickey Stevenson, who cowrote her first single “It Should Have Been Me” with Norman Whitfield.

[Excerpt: Kim Weston, “It Should Have Been Me”]

Soon after that track came out, Weston became part of Marvin Gaye’s touring revue — at this time it was normal for big stars to have a whole touring package with several smaller performers singing with their backing band before they came out themselves to do their own set — and she was also the first choice for a song that her husband co-wrote with Gaye and Ivy Joe Hunter, but when she passed on the song it became a hit for Martha and the Vandellas, with Gaye playing drums:

[Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street”]

Before Mary Wells’ defection to Twentieth Century Fox, the plan had been for her to record a second album of duets with Gaye, and many songs had been written for it. Weston was substituted for Wells, and the album was recorded.

A single, intended as a teaser for the album, was cowritten by Stevenson and Alphonso Higden, who appears to have been a Baltimore-based songwriter who later went to prison for numbers running and whose career highlight otherwise is a Flamingoes B-side:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston, “What Good Am I Without You”]

While that was a top thirty R&B hit, it didn’t even make the top forty on the pop charts, and given that all Gaye’s solo singles were going top ten R&B and top thirty pop, it was clear that the duet plan wasn’t going to work, and the album was shelved, especially after “How Sweet it Is” became such a huge success.

Gaye’s work with Holland, Dozier, and Holland didn’t last very long, partly because he was pushing against their insistence on higher keys, and partly because they were spending most of their time on the Four Tops and especially the Supremes, whose success in 1964 was so huge that the whole Motown organisation became reoriented around them, much to the annoyance of many of the other Motown artists.

But as Gaye was one of the label’s biggest stars, he was still given one of the top-tier Motown writer-producers to work with — Smokey Robinson, who was also one of Gaye’s closer friends in the organisation, and who had as well as his own records been writing and producing for the Temptations, who were one of Gaye’s favourite acts.

The first song that Robinson and his fellow Miracles wrote for Gaye, “I’ll Be Doggone”, isn’t one of the better songs in either man’s repertoire, though it did well enough on the charts, and was even Gaye’s first R&B number one, but “Ain’t That Peculiar”, another R&B number one and top ten pop hit is one of Gaye’s finest early hits:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Ain’t That Peculiar”]

But after that, Gaye’s next three singles, all of them produced by Robinson and co-written by Robinson and his Miracles bandmates, did much worse on the charts. They all made the R&B top twenty, but “One More Heartache” only made number twenty-nine on the pop charts, and the two follow-ups didn’t make the top forty at all. By late 1966, Gaye was being left behind as the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Miracles, the Isley Brothers, Stevie Wonder and the Temptations were all doing massively better than him. His attempt to reinvent himself as an R&B performer appealing mostly to the Black audience had gone too far, and he now wasn’t selling at all to the white audiences who still dominated pop sales.

Something had to change, and then something did:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston, “It Takes Two”]

The album that Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston had recorded in 1964 had sat around for two years on the shelf. And Kim Weston was feeling like *she* had been left on the shelf. She was still part of Gaye’s touring act — they would duet together and she would perform her own set — and she had released a handful of singles of her own, some of them later to be considered classics, like “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While)”:

[Excerpt: Kim Weston, “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While)”]

But she felt like her career was being completely neglected by Motown, and that Berry Gordy was if anything actively trying to destroy her career — she’s talked in the past about Gordy coming up to her after one of the Motortown Revue shows and telling her she was making the real stars look bad. She had still been able to record — her husband was Mickey Stevenson, who was head of A&R at Motown, and so she was always going to be able to get *some* recordings done — and she’d even recorded more duets with Gaye, though they’d gone unreleased. But nothing was getting released, and she was making her displeasure more and more known.

And Stevenson was also getting increasingly annoyed with Motown. In particular, he considered himself to be at least as important to the label’s success as Berry Gordy or Smokey Robinson, and he wanted a level of recognition that went with that — he wanted stock in the label, and frankly he had good reason, given that he was the person who had signed almost all the label’s big acts, and he had written and produced more than his fair share of big hits.

So as a way of killing three birds with one stone — placating Kim Weston, making Mickey Stevenson feel a bit better, and possibly boosting Marvin Gaye’s flagging career — an album was put out in late 1966 cobbling together some of the recordings that Gaye and Weston had made in 1964 along with a few later ones, though even the later ones were mostly recorded more than a year before they were released. The lead single, “It Takes Two”, was written by Stevenson and Sylvia Moy, and it became a huge hit, reaching number four on the R&B chart and the top twenty in the pop chart, as well as becoming the first hit for either artist in the UK:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston, “It Takes Two”]

For the next couple of years, Marvin Gaye’s career was completely repositioned. He released a handful of solo singles, which did well on the R&B charts but were only middling successes on the pop charts, but as a duet performer he was now unbeatable, having a whole string of huge pop hits.

But those hits wouldn’t be with Kim Weston. The attempt to placate her and Mickey Stevenson had failed, and much like Mary Wells, by the time her duet with Gaye became a hit she’d left for another label, this time following her husband first to MGM Records then to his own label, People. Sadly, also like Wells before her, Weston had no further chart success, and Stevenson also had his career largely end after departing from Motown.

So instead of Kim Weston, Gaye was teamed with another singer, one who had been on the label for nearly two years but had so far had little success.

But in some ways, Tammi Terrell was almost made for Motown records. Indeed, Thomasina Montgomery had changed her name from Tommy to Tammy when she was twelve, inspired by the same Debbie Reynolds song that had made Berry Gordy want to name his label Tammy, before he had to change it to Tamla:

[Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, “Tammy”]

Around the time she changed her name, she started performing live at talent shows, and even appearing on a local TV kids’ show on a regular basis, as the only Black girl in the cast. But it wasn’t until she reached the ripe old age of sixteen that she made her first records. She was initially signed to Scepter Records by Luther Dixon. Most of what she recorded for Scepter was demos of songs Dixon wrote for the Shirelles, but she did release a couple of singles of her own. The first Tammy Montgomery single, “If You See Bill” was written and produced by Dixon and released on Scepter in 1961:

[Excerpt: Tammy Montgomery, “If You See Bill”]

That wasn’t a success, and nor was her follow-up, this time on Scepter’s subsidiary Wand, “Voice of Experience”, with the Shirelles on backing vocals:

[Excerpt: Tammy Montgomery, “Voice of Experience”]

But in late 1962, she got what she thought would be her big opportunity. She’d spent a big chunk of the year singing with a vocal group called the Red Caps, who had been around in various incarnations since the 1930s, and who Marv Goldberg, the world’s greatest expert on R&B vocal groups, describes as “one of the most important of all performing groups”, though they were far bigger live than they ever were on record and so we’ve not had much cause to discuss them in this podcast.

In 1962, the Red Caps were on the way down, and indeed had split into two groups — the one Tammy sang with was the one called The Modern Red Caps — but they were still important enough that they brought Tammy to people’s attention, and one person who paid attention was Buddy Nolan, who was one of James Brown’s road managers and based in Philadelphia, where Tammy had been brought up. Nolan introduced Tammy to Brown in August 1962, just weeks before his famous stint at the Apollo, and *right* after the Apollo shows Yvonne Fair, Brown’s main female vocalist and duet partner in his shows, left the tour because she was pregnant with Brown’s child. Brown needed a new duet partner, and as Brown would always say, “I tended to go with whoever was my lead female singer on the show at the time, so, on the road, she’d be with me.”

So for James Brown’s next shows after the Apollo residency, the female vocalist, and Brown’s sexual partner, was Tammy Montgomery.

Brown also signed Montgomery to his own new record label, Try Me, and wrote and produced a single for her, “I Cried”, which made number ninety-nine on the Hot One Hundred for one week, the first thing she’d done that had had any success at all:

[Excerpt: Tammy Montgomery, “I Cried”]

But unfortunately, Tammy Montgomery was terrible at picking men, and if you missed the content warnings at the beginning of this episode, here is where things start to get bad. As well as being the kind of person who would sack one of his singers because she was pregnant with his child, James Brown was a violently abusive man to all his partners. Brown said of Tammy in his autobiography “Somewhere during this time I cut Tammi on my Try Me label. I was crazy about her by then, but I think her family wanted her to do something else. They took her away from me because she had a lot of talent. I think they wanted me to groom her, not fall in love with her. I wanted to keep her with me, but I couldn’t stop it. They took her away. But she always kept coming back whenever she got the chance and tried to talk to me. It was painful to me. I found out she even talked to the woman I was living with later on, saying to her, “You have the best man in the world, and if you ever have a problem, I’ll come back and take him from you.” She still loved me.”

Part of that unfortunately does ring true — Tammy was known to be far too forgiving of men in her life — but as for how she came to leave Brown, the story usually told by people who weren’t James Brown is that Brown beat her even more viciously than usual, for what he perceived as the crime of not standing at the side of the stage watching him adoringly during his own performance, and that Gene Chandler, who was also on the bill, saw this and got in touch with Tammy’s family and got her to safety.

Other sources say that Tammy’s next manager, Babe Chivian, took one of his other singers, Betty Harris, to visit Tammy in hospital after Brown had injured her particularly badly.

Either way, James Brown would sadly not be the last hugely talented abusive monster that Tammy would become romantically attached to.

After leaving Brown, Tammy got signed to Chess’ subsidiary Checker Records, and Chivian, who was also Solomon Burke’s manager, got Bert Berns to produce what would be her only single for the label, a song she co-wrote with Berns, “If I Would Marry You”:

[Excerpt: Tammy Montgomery, “If I Would Marry You”]

But after that flopped, she decided to quit music and go to university — she was enrolled in a pre-med course after she turned eighteen. But a little over a year into this time, Jerry Butler, the former singer with the Impressions who was now having a very successful solo career, asked her to perform in his show, and assured her that he would arrange her performances around her studies so she wouldn’t have to quit university.

And it was in a support slot for Butler at the 20 Grand club — the same nightclub where he’d punched Marvin Gaye for not going on stage — that Berry Gordy saw Tammy Montgomery perform for the first time, and offered her a contract with Motown. But he wanted her to have a new name.

At the time, Muhammad Ali had been stripped of the title of the world heavyweight boxing champion by the WBA, one of two boxing associations in the US, as punishment for joining the Nation of Islam (the other boxing association, the World Boxing Council, didn’t remove Ali’s title) and the new WBA champion was named Ernie Terrell. Berry Gordy, who was of course himself a former boxer, thought it would be a good idea to take Terrell’s surname for publicity.

(Oddly, Ernie Terrell was himself a singer, and he sang in a group with his sister Jean, who would later become a Motown singer herself, replacing Diana Ross in the Supremes).

The newly-renamed Tammi Terrell — and you can’t tell from me saying it, but the spelling of her first name was also changed, from T-a-m-m-y to T-a-m-m-i — was assigned to Harvey Fuqua, who with his friend Johnny Bristol wrote and produced her first single for Motown, “I Can’t Believe You Love Me”:

[Excerpt: Tammi Terrell, “I Can’t Believe You Love Me”]

That and the follow-up, “Come On And See Me”, both made the R&B top thirty, but then the decision was made to make Tammi Terrell the new duet partner for Gaye.

The song that was chosen for the first release was the first song for Motown by a new songwriting partnership. Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson were a married couple who had started out as performers, recording a couple of singles as “Valerie and Nick” with the great record producer Henry Glover:

[Excerpt: Valerie and Nick, “I’ll Find You”]

But after those singles failed, they went off to become songwriters, forming a songwriting trio with Josephine Armistead, a former member of the Ikettes who had also sung backing vocals with James Brown. The trio wrote songs for the Shirelles, Chuck Jackson, and Aretha Franklin, who recorded their “Cry Like a Baby” while she was still at Columbia:

[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Cry Like a Baby”]

One of the songs they wrote for the Coasters, “Let’s Go Get Stoned”, was cut by Ray Charles on his release from prison in 1966, and became an R&B number one:

[Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Let’s Go Get Stoned”]

Charles also recorded a second Ashford, Simpson, and Armistead song, “I Don’t Need No Doctor”, as his next single, and that became a minor R&B standard. But by the time Charles picked up on the songs, the trio were splitting up. Armistead moved to Chicago with her husband and tried to start a career as a solo singer, with limited success — she later returned to New York and became an in-demand backing vocalist, singing with Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, and Esther Phillips, as well as guesting on seventies records by her former collaborators.

Ashford and Simpson, meanwhile, moved on to Motown, who had become interested in working with them after the success of “Let’s Go Get Stoned”. They brought with them a new song written as a knock-off of Ike and Tina Turner’s recent hit, “River Deep, Mountain High”, and Fuqua and Bristol produced it as a Tammi Terrell track:

[Excerpt: Tammi Terrell, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”]

But then “It Takes Two” came out and was a success. Fuqua and Bristol got Gaye into the studio to replace some of Terrell’s lead vocal lines, and it became another duet hit, making the pop top twenty and number three on the R&B charts.

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”]

When Gaye’s next solo single, an undistinguished Holland-Dozier-Holland song titled “Your Unchanging Love” which had already been out on Gaye’s album Moods of Marvin Gaye for nearly a year, only made number thirty-three on the pop charts, Gaye’s position was set — for the rest of 1967 and 1968 he was going to be Tammi Terrell’s duet partner. “Your Unchanging Love” was Gaye’s only solo single in an eighteen-month period from July 1966 through December 1967.

Things could have been very different though, because “Your Unchanging Love” was the record that was chosen by Motown’s Quality Control department in place of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”.

While “Grapevine” went unreleased, Gaye was proud of his performance of the song. The song had a deep personal meaning for him, as his marriage to Anna Gordy was in trouble. The two wouldn’t divorce for several more years, but both of them were extremely jealous and, by all accounts, both gave their spouse *reason* to be jealous. As Gaye later said “I believed every word of the song. It was happening to me. The doubting, the friends whispering in my ear, the suspicions.”

In recent years, the isolated vocal track has circulated on the Internet, and even without Paul Riser’s instrumental arrangement, it’s amazing how much of the track is carried just by Gaye and the Andantes:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (a capella)”]

But it was simply not a commercial enough record, and instead Motown released “Your Unchanging Love” and then refocused Gaye’s career entirely on duets. In the early sixties, Gaye released two solo albums a year on average, but between May 1966 when Moods of Marvin Gaye came out and August 1968 when In The Groove was released, as well as only releasing two solo singles in more than two years, he also didn’t release any solo albums, though he did release three duet albums — Take Two with Kim Weston and United and You’re All I Need with Tammi Terrell.

This did not make the stresses in his marriage to Anna Gordy any easier — one of the things she got jealous of was the apparent relationships he had with his duet partners. Though in fact there was nothing for her to worry about there — Kim Weston was at the time married to Gaye’s friend Mickey Stevenson, and since she’d signed with Motown Tammi Terrell had been in a relationship with David Ruffin of the Temptations, who were having their own success with Norman Whitfield producing songs like “(I Know) I’m Losing You”, which is another song that Gaye might have found very relatable at the time:

[Excerpt: The Temptations, “(I Know) I’m Losing You”]

Ruffin was one of the singers that Gaye most admired, but sadly as a human being he was far from admirable. He took up with Terrell while he was still married to his first wife, and even announced his engagement to her, on stage, on the same day yet another woman he was in a relationship with was giving birth to his child.

Ruffin seems to have thought that Terrell was someone he could sponge off financially — according to some people Terrell fantasised that she was going to inherit a million dollars on her twenty-first birthday, and Ruffin believed her, and thought of himself as a pimp who could live off his women — but Terrell seems to have actually loved him.

Their relationship was always a strained one — Terrell had had a very traumatic early life, and also suffered from terrible headaches, and she had taken to using hard drugs, and many of Ruffin’s friends blame her for introducing him to cocaine. But while Terrell was in some ways a difficult person, she is generally spoken of by most people who knew her in broadly positive terms. Kim Weston, for example, talks about how after she left Motown many people blanked her, supposedly on the orders of Gordy, but Terrell just said “I knew you before I worked for Motown, nobody’s going to tell me who I can speak to”.

Ruffin, on the other hand, is spoken of barely as a person at all, but as almost a terrifying absence of humanity, an empty shell of a person. And he became violently jealous of Tammi as she became better known. While Ruffin was only known as one member of a group, she was known by name, and he *hated* that.

He beat her often, and to an extent that the other people at Motown found shocking. This was a time and environment when violence against women was sadly even more normalised than it is today, and behaviour that today would lead to complete ostracism was considered just a normal part of a relationship. But even so, Ruffin’s behaviour is still spoken of by people who were there in hushed tones.

Tammi had always suffered from migraines, but they were getting worse, and for a while she blamed Ruffin’s beatings — Otis Williams talks about her having him feel lumps on her head and explaining that they were the reason for her not feeling well — but she worked through the pain and the duo continued having hits, mostly written by Ashford & Simpson and produced by Fuqua and Bristol, like “Your Precious Love”, which made number five on the pop charts and number two on the R&B charts:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “Your Precious Love”]

But then, on October the fourteenth 1967, only six months after the release of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, Tammi Terrell collapsed on stage in the middle of a duet with Marvin. It turned out that those headaches had been caused not by Ruffin’s beatings, nor by normal migraines, but by a malignant brain tumour. Many of the people in Terrell’s life to this day blame Ruffin’s physical abuse of her for the tumour, though as far as I’m able to tell there’s no medical evidence that physical trauma can cause tumours.

While she was receiving treatment, Gaye went out on tour with various other female singers covering for Terrell, and released a solo single, “You”, which was nowhere near as big a hit as the Terrell duets. In early 1968, “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”, another Ashford and Simpson duet for the two of them, recorded just before Tammi’s collapse, came out and once again made the top ten on the pop charts and number one R&B:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing”]

By this point, Ruffin had left Terrell — looking after a sick girlfriend wasn’t his idea of fun.

Terrell did manage to get back into the studio, as her health improved temporarily after a brain operation, and cut another big hit with Gaye, “You’re All I Need to Get By”, another Ashford and Simpson song produced by Fuqua and Bristol:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “You’re All I Need to Get By”]

That became another massive hit, again going top ten pop and number one R&B. But her health continued to deteriorate, and she had to have more and more operations. She was only infrequently able to get into the studio, and the second Marvin and Tammi album only got released because Gaye overdubbed new vocals on six unreleased Tammi solo tracks, as he had with their original hit.

Given Terrell’s health problems, Gaye had to continue performing solo, though he was increasingly unhappy on stage, and his first solo single of 1968, “Chained”, did little better than “You” or “Your Unchanging Love”.

But in August 1968, an album was released, In The Groove, packaging together Gaye’s solo singles, and as was normal practice, a bunch of unreleased tracks that weren’t good enough for singles but were good enough as album filler.

And one of those started to get some radio play. It got a *lot* of radio play:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”]

“I Heard it Through the Grapevine”, a track that had been recorded in February 1967 but considered not good enough to release, was so instantly popular with DJs when the album came out that even though Gladys Knight and the Pips’ version had only been a hit a year earlier, it was rush-released as a single. It sold four million copies, and overtook Knight’s version of the song as Motown’s biggest ever hit single. Gladys Knight’s version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was the first R&B number one of 1968, and Marvin Gaye’s was the last. But Gaye’s version also went to number one on the pop charts, and in the UK.

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”]

But Gaye was distraught. He recorded two albums with Norman Whitfield in 1969, and had two more million-selling Whitfield and Strong songs, “Too Busy Thinking ‘Bout My Baby” and “That’s The Way Love Is” — in a reversal of the previous years now it was the duets with Tammi that were only moderate hits — but his marriage was falling apart, and his singing partner was by this point deathly ill.

As he told an interviewer “Tammi is still very ill, she had to have brain surgery. And both Mary and Kim left the company after we’d done duets together. We did duets because we thought they’d be a novelty, but after a while they became a necessity. I don’t anticipate doing any more in the near future.… I don’t think I’m very lucky for whoever I’m doing duets with.”

As well as the two albums with Whitfield, which are much darker, more depressed, records than his earlier recordings had been, there was a third album of duets with Tammi. Or at least, it was released as an album of duets with Tammi, and she’s definitely singing on at least some of them.

But according to Gaye and several other sources, the vocals on tracks like the hit single “The Onion Song” aren’t Tammi Terrell at all:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “The Onion Song”]

By the middle of 1969, Tammi was losing her hair, blind, and using a wheelchair. She had a total of eight brain operations, but they were clearly not working.

And according to Marvin Gaye, the last “Marvin and Tammi” records were actually “Marvin and Valerie” records, with Valerie Simpson ghosting for Terrell’s vocals, doing a good impersonation of Terrell’s voice. Gaye and Simpson went ahead with the deception so that Tammi would get some royalties to help with her medical expenses.

Simpson has always denied this, and said that she sang guide vocals in the studio with Gaye and that Terrell later rerecorded the parts herself. There is still a huge controversy among Motown scholars as to whether the vocals are Simpson doing a very good imitation of Terrell, or Terrell copying Simpson’s guide vocal very closely so she sounded similar:

[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “The Onion Song”]

But Gaye definitely believed it was Simpson, and it didn’t sit right with him, and he was suffering from a deep depression. He said later “My success didn’t seem real. I didn’t deserve it. I knew I could have done more. I felt like a puppet—Berry’s puppet, Anna’s puppet. I had a mind of my own and I wasn’t using it. I’d seen how the business was destroying many of my friends and colleagues. I was afraid the same thing would happen to me, so I backed off. There had to be a limit to commercialism. At some point, every true artist realizes that.”

We’ll see how Gaye dealt with that in a future episode, but the breaking point which almost made him quit music for good came in 1970.

Tammi Terrell’s last live performance was at the Harlem Apollo in 1969. She was in her wheelchair in the front row in one of Marvin’s shows, and he got down from the stage to duet with her on “You’re All I Need to Get By”. She got a standing ovation from the crowd, at what was her only performance since her collapse.

By that point she was engaged to one of the doctors at her hospital, but she would never live to see her wedding day. She died in March 1970, after spending several weeks in a coma. She was only twenty-four.

Gaye was devastated, and he gave up live performance altogether for a couple of years, and nearly left the music business altogether. He was the only person from Motown allowed at her funeral, because her mother was disgusted at what she considered the unforgivable exploitation of her sick daughter. Gaye gave her eulogy while “You’re All I Need to Get By” played in the background.

Tammi Terrell’s death is now mostly viewed as a dividing line in the career of her duet partner, the turning point that changed Marvin Gaye’s artistry, a talented young woman’s life and legacy reduced in history to a traumatic motivation for a more successful man — though at least, unlike the other men in her life, Gaye actually did care about her as a person.

But at the end, Tammi Terrell’s last thoughts weren’t of Marvin Gaye, or of the doctor to whom she had recently become engaged, but of the monstrous abuser many people blamed for her illness. The last words she said before slipping into a coma were “Take care of David”.