Gladys Knight heard it through the grapevine

I am very attached to Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and somehow managed to not even hear Gladys Knight’s recording until late in life. I recognized immediately that Gladys’ version is a banger, but it took me a while to relax my preconceptions and warm up to it.

Norman Whitfield produced both Marvin’s and Gladys’ versions. He had worked on Marvin’s version first, but Berry Gordy didn’t think it had commercial potential, so for Gladys’ recording, they took a different approach. Whitfield was inspired by Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, and he wanted to give “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” a funk groove in the Muscle Shoals vein. Gladys spent a few weeks working out the vocal arrangement with the Pips (her brother and two of her cousins), and the effort shows through in the results.

I love the Reflex Re-vision, because it takes everything delightful about the original and gives you lots more of it.

Here’s an all-too-brief clip of Gladys doing the song in Summer of Soul, which, if you haven’t seen it, don’t deprive yourself another minute.

In 1983, Gladys and Marvin performed the song together in a kind of mashup of their two versions.

Here’s my transcription of Gladys’ recording.

The intro is four bars of a straight sixteenths Latin groove before shifting into swinging funk sixteenths in the first verse. It sounds more uptempo than Marvin Gaye’s recording, but Marvin’s is actually a few BPM faster. Gladys’ version feels faster because it has a sixteenth note pulse, which packs more notes and drum hits into the bar than Marvin’s eighth note pulse. Gladys’ version is also harmonically brighter; while Marvin’s version is mostly in minor/Dorian, Gladys’ is major-flavored blues tonality. Like Marvin, Gladys sings a lot of blue thirds, notes in between E-flat and E-natural; I wrote them as the closest piano-key pitch and colored them blue.

Aside from the vocals, the most distinctive part of Gladys’ track is the gospel-flavored piano part (supported by a guitar part that is hard to aurally separate). The front half of each bar in the piano part is usually a string of sixteenth notes starting on the downbeat. The back half of each bar consistently accents two weak subdivisions, the “and” of three and the sixteenth note subdivision after beat four. It is so hip! James Jamerson’s bass dances around the subdivisions unpredictably, but the drums (not sure who plays them) thump out steady eighth notes without any fills or variations. This is the kind of contrast that makes Motown grooves so ear-grabbing.

Like Marvin’s recording, the Gladys Knight track has had a long cultural afterlife. House producers in particular love to sample the vocals. The best and most creative flip I have heard is this one by FKJ.

Here’s a final thing, unrelated to “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Today was Michael Jackson day in the Song Factory class. Gladys Knight was a friend of Michael’s, and she sang at his funeral. In the aftermath of Michael’s death, she did a bunch of TV interviews. At some point, someone asked her why Michael was so messed up. She answered, “We did that to him. We made him so famous. We just kept taking little pieces of him. Look what we did.” That has been playing on and off as a loop in my head ever since then.