My first exposure to Marvin Gaye’s recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was on the Big Chill soundtrack, which my baby boomer parents kept in heavy rotation.
Here’s a live version. Nobody wore a glittery tux like Marvin Gaye.
Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote the tune in 1966. Marvin Gaye was not the first Motown artist to record it. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles recorded it first.
Marvin Gaye recorded his version next, but neither his nor the Miracles’ were released right away. Gladys Knight and the Pips recorded it third, and their version was first to come out. If you only know Marvin Gaye’s take, you’ll be surprised by how uptempo and gospel-like the Gladys Knight version is.
(Check out the Reflex Re-vision too!)
Gladys Knight’s recording got to number one on the Billboard R&B Singles chart and number two on the Pop Singles chart, and rightly so, it’s a banger. Marvin Gaye’s version is not as much fun, and Berry Gordy didn’t think it had much commercial potential. When Motown did eventually release it, they didn’t put it out as a single; it was an album track on In The Groove. Nevertheless, DJs started playing it on the radio, and once it did get rereleased as a single, it spent seven weeks at the top of the Billboard pop chart, making it the biggest Motown hit to date.
Breathtakingly great though Marvin’s track is, you can see why Berry Gordy didn’t regard it as an obvious pop smash. Tom Breihan explains why in his invaluable column The Number Ones.
It’s a dark, clammy creep. A cold, quiet drum-crack announces the arrival. Organ and guitar ooze out a sense of general foreboding. Horns sound a warning. And a man, wounded and tense, only barely chokes out his accusation. A woman is leaving him, and she didn’t have the decency to tell him herself. Or maybe that’s just what he’s heard, or what he assumes, and his own paranoia will be what undoes the relationship. He tells the woman that she should just tell him, but he’s already made up his mind that the rumors are true. He knows it’s over, and he can’t handle it. Strings and backup singers murmur their reassurance, but a feeling of dank apocalyptic dread still hangs over everything. It’s a pop song reimagined as a nervous breakdown.
Listening to Gaye’s “Grapevine” today, I can hear why [Berry] Gordy was so reluctant to let Gaye release the track as a single, and I can also hear why so many people loved the song right away. Those two opposing forces are the same thing. Berry Gordy had gotten rich selling bright, upbeat pop music to white America. “Grapevine” is the opposite of all that. It’s one of the heaviest songs ever to hit #1 — a black hole of hurt and suspicion and bad faith.
Marvin’s vocal timbre is haunting on purpose. Apparently they placed the song a little too high in his range on purpose so he’d have to strain to hit the high notes. It adds to the overall sense of desperation. Why should such an angst-ridden tune be such a pleasure? For me, hearing a track that is this well-made feels like being expertly taken care of. Everyone from the songwriters to the arrangers to the session musicians to the engineers to Marvin himself is working hard to make sure we feel good. Everything is tightly controlled, but not too controlled; there’s space for individual idiosyncrasy here too.
One reason why Marvin Gaye’s recording is so powerful is arrangement, big and complex without being too crowded. The angelic backing vocals are by the Andantes. Earl Van Dyke plays Hammond organ, including the tense pedal tone bassline in the intro. Johnny Griffith plays the funky distorted Wurlitzer electric piano. The fill he plays in the chorus after the line “not much longer would you be mine” is maybe the most soulful thing that anyone has ever put to tape. James Jamerson plays bass, and he is characteristically unpredictable; I don’t think he hits a single downbeat the entire time. There are two drummers on the song: Uriel Jones plays a regular kit, while Richard “Pistol” Allen plays toms only. Jack Ashford also plays congas. Finally, there are strings and French horns by members of the Detroit Symphony.
Here’s my transcription.
The tune is mainly in E-flat Dorian mode, and it revolves around Ebm and Ab7, the chords you get from the first and fourth degrees of that scale.
However, the tune also deviates from E-flat Dorian in crucial and fascinating ways. Specifically, it borrows several chords from parallel E-flat major. However, whether the underlying chord comes from E-flat major or E-flat minor, the vocal melody mainly uses G-flat, the minor third. This all adds up to E-flat blues tonality rather than simple Dorian mode.
The opening groove is a series of syncopated power chords built on the first, second and third degrees of the scale. You don’t hear a lot of power chords played on electric piano. At the end of the first bar, there’s an Eb5 that anticipates the next downbeat by a quarter note. At the end of the second bar, the concluding Eb5 anticipates the next downbeat by an eighth note. That is a lot of rhythmic instability already. The groove is anchored by the steady quarter note pedal tone in the organ. (In my chart, I put that pedal in the bass part.) After six bars, the groove changes to Ebm and Ab in a different rhythmically unpredictable pattern. The verse begins with the same Ebm and Ab7 as the intro, but under the word “plans”, it moves to a Bb chord. This is the V chord in E-flat major, but it doesn’t resolve back to Eb, it moves to Ab7, in keeping with the harmonic conventions of the blues. The band voices it as an Ab9, and the keyboard leaves out the root, so it sounds like Cø7. That’s a rich and dark sonority.
The biggest harmonic surprise comes in the prechorus (or actually an eighth note before the prechorus): a Cm chord. That is very unexpected in E-flat Dorian! This chord does several different things at once. You hear the parallelism of a minor chord moving down by a minor third. Two of the three pitches in Cm are common to E-flat Dorian: C and E-flat. However, there’s also G natural, which is the major third in E-flat. The vocal melody repeatedly hits G-flat on top of Cm, for a bluesy flat fifth sound. This same melody would work equally well in an E-flat blues context and in a C blues context. The word “surprise” is a neat bit of text painting, since it’s over the surprising Cm chord. In a further surprise, it jumps from the note C down a tritone to G-flat. So hip!
After the Cm, there’s an Eb major chord, which is also serving two different functions. It’s the parallel major to the expected Ebm, but also the relative major to Cm. From there, it moves to Ab7, the IV7 chord in either E-flat Dorian or E-flat major. However, you still have C minor in your aural memory, which suggests that Ab7 might also be the bVI7, the “minor blues subdominant”, or as I mentally refer to it, the Pink Panther chord. Check out the line “when I found out yesterday.” Over an Eb chord, Marvin sings “found” and “yes” on G-flat and “out” on A-flat. If you are listening with your Western tonal theory ears, those are some strong clashes. If you are listening with your blues tonality ears, everything is right and correct.
The chorus alternates Eb7 and Ab7, while the vocal melody continues to repeatedly emphasize G-flat. That’s the classic sound of the blues. I have yet to see a transcription or chord chart get this part right, and people play it wrong in their cover versions too: everybody writes/plays Ebm instead of Eb7. I mean, I can understand why. The song is supposed to be minor or Dorian, and the melody is minor, so why wouldn’t the chord be Ebm? But listen closely! It’s even easier to hear it in the multitrack stems. (This reminds me of the unexpected C7 chords in “Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin, which is supposedly in C minor.) Marvin further defies expectations by hitting a clear G natural the second time he sings “I heard it through the grapevine” on the word “heard.” Casually flipping between parallel major and minor like this violates basic assumptions of Western tonal harmony, but that’s the sound of the blues.
I am not going to get into all the subtleties of Marvin Gaye’s rhythmic phrasing. You can hear them perfectly well for yourself anyway. I will point out how fascinating it is to hear how Marvin sets up expectations of how the melody is going to go and then subtly defies those expectations, regularly tripping you up. It doesn’t feel like he’s showing off or being clever for the sake of cleverness, though. He just wants you to know that there are a lot of different ways to phrase a given blues riff, and he is going to choose the one that sounds optimally smooth. I am an adept transcriber, and I can usually get pop songs down in notation without too much trouble. For this song, though, I had to go through Marvin’s vocals and loop them a beat at a time to get all the unpredictable placement of syllables.
Beyond Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Miracles, many people have recorded covers of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” As a teenager, I loved the Creedence Clearwater Revival version. It’s absurdly long, but it has a nice groove the whole time, and John Fogerty’s guitar solo is surprisingly funky. I especially appreciate that they don’t rush the tempo.
Check out the Reflex Re-vision of the Creedence cover too, it’s superb.
The Average White Band does a very respectable cover too.
Zapp and Roger’s cover sounds like it’s mainly just an excuse to horse around in the studio, but they’re incapable of sounding bad.
The Slits version is not really my thing, but I do like the vocals.
Bill Frisell explores the moodily abstract side of the tune, to excellent effect.
Marvin’s track has been sampled and quoted many times. I love this blend of several Marvin classics with Mos Def/Yasiin Bey by Amerigo Gazzaway:
This smooth R&B track includes some nice vocal chops of Marvin:
Let me end on a less serious note, from my friend Henry, a fellow connoisseur of dad jokes: “Marvin Gaye used to keep a sheep in my vineyard. He’d herd it through the grapevines.”