Marvin Gaye

Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. was born on the second of April 1939 at Washington, D.C., the second of four children of the Reverend Marvin Pentz Gay Sr. — a minister of the strict Hebrew Pentecostal House of God denomination — and Alberta Cooper Gay, a domestic worker. The Gay household at Cardozo High School district of Washington was profoundly devout and economically straitened. He sang in his father's congregation from his fourth year and learned piano and drums from the Sunday-school programme. He completed Cardozo High School in 1956 and enlisted in the United States Air Force the same year. He was discharged in 1957 on grounds of mental insubordination.

He joined the Marquees, a Washington doo-wop group, and met Harvey Fuqua of the Moonglows in late 1957. The Marquees were absorbed into Fuqua's New Moonglows; he moved with Fuqua to Detroit in 1960. He met Anna Gordy — sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy — at the Motown offices in 1960 and married her in 1961. He took the additional "e" of Gaye in 1961 to mark his transition to popular music.

He recorded across the 1960s the body of Motown-produced singles — "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" (1962), "Hitch Hike" (1962), "How Sweet It Is" (1965), "Ain't That Peculiar" (1965), "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" (1968), the duets with Tammi Terrell — that established him as the principal male solo vocalist of the Motown studio system.

The death of his duet partner Tammi Terrell in March 1970 from a brain tumour produced his decisive break with the Motown machine. He withdrew from public performance for fifteen months and produced across that retreat — against the substantial objection of Berry Gordy — the concept album What's Going On of May 1971. The nine-track suite — drawing the contemporary American war and ecological and urban-poverty conditions, structured to play without break between tracks — was the founding concept album of Black American popular music. It sold over two million copies in its first year and is regularly identified by present critical consensus as one of the principal recordings of twentieth-century American popular music.

He produced subsequently Let's Get It On of 1973, the 1976 disco album I Want You, the 1978 confessional album Here, My Dear, and the 1982 comeback album Midnight Love which yielded "Sexual Healing."

He was shot and killed by his father at the family's Los Angeles home on the first of April 1984 — the day before his forty-fifth birthday.

He is honored here as the composer of What's Going On.