Song 174A: “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Part One, “If At First You Don’t Succeed…”

A history of folk music in 500 songs

by Andrew King.

Song 174.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine by Marvin Gaye.

Part 1.

If at first you don't succeed.

Before I start, a brief note.

This episode contains some brief mentions of miscarriage and drug abuse.

The history of modern music would be immeasurably different had it not been for one car breakdown.

Norman Whitfield spent the first fifteen years of his life in New York, never leaving the city until his grandmother died.

She had lived in LA,

and that was where the funeral was held, and so the Whitfield family got into a car and drove right across the whole continent, 2,500 miles, to attend the old lady's funeral.

And then, after the funeral, they turned round and started to drive home again.

But they only got as far as Detroit when the car, understandably, gave up the ghost.

Luckily, like many black families, they had family in Detroit, and Norman's aunt was not only willing to put the family up for a while, but her husband was able to give Norman's father a job in his drugstore while he saved up enough money to pay for the car to be fixed.

But as it happened, the family liked Detroit, and they never did get around to driving back home to New York.

Young Norman, in particular, took to the city's nightlife, and soon, as well as going to school, he was working an evening job at a petrol station, but that was only to supplement the money he made as a pool hustler.

Young Norman was never going to be the kind of person who took a day job, and so along with his pool, he started hanging out with musicians.

In particular, with Popcorn and the Mohawks, a band led by Popcorn Wiley.

See me, send me go like.

If you can send me golly, you won't be behind.

You wiggle all over,

and the feeling is so go fine.

Popcorn and the Mohawks were a band of serious jazz musicians, many of whom, including Wiley himself, went on to be members of the Funk Funk Brothers, the team of session players that played on Motown's hits, though Wiley would depart Motown fairly early, after a falling out with Berry Gordy.

They were some of the best musicians in Detroit at the time, and Whitfield would tag along with the group and play tambourine, and sometimes other hand percussion instruments.

He wasn't a serious musician at that point, just hanging out with a bunch of people who were, who were a year or two older than him, but he was learning.

One thing that everyone says about Norman Whitfield in his youth is that he was someone who would stand on the periphery of every situation, not getting involved but soaking in everything that the people around him were doing and learning from them.

And soon he was playing percussion on sessions.

At first this wasn't for Motown, but everything in the Detroit music scene connected back to the Gordy family in one way or another.

In this case the label was Thelma Records.

which was formed by Berry Gordy's ex-mother-in-law and named after Gordy's first wife, who he had recently divorced.

Of all the great Motown songwriters and producers, Whitfield's life is the least documented, to the extent that the chronology of his early career is very vague and contradictory, and Thelma was such a small label there even seems to be some dispute about when it existed.

Different sources give different dates, and while Whitfield always said he worked for Thelma Records, he might have actually been employed by another label owned by the same people, Gigi, which might have operated earlier.

But by most accounts, Whitfield quickly progressed from session tambourine player to songwriter.

According to an article on Whitfield from 1977, the first record of one of his songs was Alone by Tommy Storm on Thelma Records.

But that record seems not to exist.

However, some people on a soul message board, discussing this a few years ago, found an interview with a member of a group called The Fabulous Peps, which also featured Storm.

saying that their record on Gigi Records, This Love I Have For You,

is a rewrite of that song by Don Davis, Felmer's head of AR, though the credit on the label for that is just to Davis and Mon Abner, another member of the group.

love I have for you

This love I have for you

So that might or might not be the first Norman Whitfield song ever to be released The other song often credited as Whitfield's first released song is Answer Me by Richard Street in the Distance

Street was another member of the fabulous Peps, but we've encountered him in the distance before when talking about the temptations.

The distance were the group that Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Al Bryans had been in before forming the Temptations, and indeed Street would much later rejoin his old bandmates in The Temptations when Whitfield was producing for them.

Unlike the fabulous Peps track, this one was clearly credited to N.

Whitfield.

So whatever happened with the Storm track, this is almost certainly Whitfield's first official credit as a songwriter.

He was soon writing songs for a lot of small labels, most of which appear to have been recorded by the Thelma team and then licensed out, like I've Gotten Over You by the Sonnettes.

Oh, yes, it's true, you made me wet

That was on KO Records, distributed by Scepter, and was a minor local hit, enough to finally bring Whitfield to the attention of Berry Gordy.

According to many sources, Whitfield had been hanging around Hittsville for months trying to get a job with the label, but as he told the story in 1977, Berry Gordy had sent Mickey Stevenson over to see me about signing with the company as an exclusive in-house writer and producer.

The first act I was assigned to was Marvin Gaye, and he had just started to become popular.

That's not quite how the story went.

According to everyone else, he was constantly hanging around Hittsville, getting himself into sessions and just watching them, and pestering people to let him get involved.

Rather than being employed as a writer and producer, he was actually given a job in Motown's quality control department for $15 a week, listening to potential records and seeing which ones he thought were hits, and rating them before they went to the regular department meetings for feedback from the truly important people.

But he was also allowed to write songs.

His first songwriting credit on a Motown record wasn't Marvin Gaye, as Whitfield would later tell the story, but was in fact for the far less prestigious Mickey Woods, possibly the single least known artist of Motown's early years.

Woods was a white teenager, the first white male solo artist signed to Motown, who released two novelty teen-pop singles.

Whitfield's first Motown song was the B-sides Woods' second single, a knock-off of Sam Cooke's Cupid called They Call Me Cupid, co-written with Berry Gordy and Brian Holland.

never had a love

that's mine

So I'm sad,

feeling so bad

Unsurprisingly, that didn't set the world on fire and Whitfield didn't get another Motown label credit for 13 months, though some of his songs for Thelma may have come out in this period.

When he did, it was as co-writer with Mickey Stevenson, and for the first time sole producer, of the first single for a new singer, Kim Weston.

You

As it turned out, that wasn't a hit, but the flip side, Love Me All the Way, co-written by Stevenson, who was also Weston's husband, and Barney Ailes, did become a minor hit, making the RB top 30.

After that, Whitfield was on his way.

It was only a month later that he wrote his first song for The Temptations, a B-side, The further you look, the less you see.

That's not the

That was co-written with Smokey Robinson, and as we heard in the episode of My Girl, both Robinson and Whitfield vied with each other for the job of Temptations writer and producer.

As we also heard in that episode, Robinson got the majority of the group's singles for the next couple of years, but Whitfield would eventually take over from him.

Whitfield's work with the Temptations is probably his most important work as a writer and producer, and the Temptations story is intertwined deeply with this one.

But for the most part, I'm going to save discussion of Whitfield's work with the group until we get to 1972, so bear with me if I seem to skim over that, and if I repeat myself in a couple of years when we get there.

Whitfield's first major success, though, was also the first top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, Pride and Joy.

You

are

my pride and joy.

And I just love you,

love you, darling.

Like a baby boy loves his toy.

You've got kisses, sweeter than honey.

And I work seven days a week to give you all my money.

And that's why you are my

pride and joy.

Pride and Joy had actually been written and recorded before the Kim Weston and Temptations tracks, and was intended as album filler.

It was written during a session by Whitfield, Gay, and Mickey Stevenson, who was also the producer of the track, and recorded in the same session as it was written, with Martha and the Vandellas on backing vocals.

The intended hit from the session, Hitchhiker, we covered in the previous episode on Gay, but that was successful enough that an album, That Stubborn Kind of Fellow, was released, with Pride and Joy on it.

A few months later, Gay Reeve cut his lead vocal over the same backing track, and the record was released as a single, reaching number 10 on the pop charts and number 2 RB.

When I'm down, when I'm down, and when we go out birdie, baby, you shake up the four times.

That's why, that's why I believe you're my

right and joy, right and joy.

Whitfield had other successes as well, often as B-sides.

The Girl's Alright With Me, the B-side to Smokey Robinson's hit for the temptations, I'll Be in Trouble, went to number 40 on the RB chart in its own right.

The girls alright with me.

Do you know the girls alright?

Yes.

The girl's alright with me.

Do you know the girls alright?

Now

she.

That was co-written with Eddie Holland, and Holland and Whitfield had a minor songwriting partnership at this time, with Holland writing lyrics and Whitfield the music.

Eddie Holland even released a Holland and Whitfield collaboration himself during his brief attempt at a singing career.

I Couldn't Cry If I Wanted To was a song they wrote for The Temptations, who recorded it but then left it on the shelf for four years.

So Holland put out his own version, again as a B-side.

and golden hair.

Your beauty seemed to hypnotize me.

I had that feeling I was no longer free.

But when I asked you for a dance,

you didn't even give me a chance,

and it hurt me through and through.

That was the first time I cried over you.

Whitfield was very much a b-side kind of songwriter and producer at this point, but this could be to his advantage.

In January 1963, around the same time as all these other tracks, he cut a filler track with the no-hit Supremes, He Means the World to Me, which was left on the shelf until they needed a B-side 18 months later, and pulled it out and released it.

But the track that that was a B-side to was Where Did Our Love Go?

And at the time you could make a lot of money from writing the B-side to a hit that big.

Indeed, at first, Whitfield made more money from Where Did All Love Go than Holland Dozier or Holland, because he got 100% of the songwriter's share for his side of the record, while they had to split their share three ways.

Slowly, Whitfield moved from being a B-side writer to being an A-side writer.

With Eddie Holland, he was given a chance at a temptation's A-side for the first time, with Girl, Why You Wanna Make Me Blue?

I love you, girl, with all my heart and soul.

Can't understand why you treat me cold.

You every wish, girl, if I can make.

And that's why I can't sing to understand

why.

Girl, girl, girl, why you wanna make me blue?

I'm asking you, girl, girl, girl, why you wanna make me blue?

He also wrote for Jimmy Ruffin, but in 1964, it was with girl groups that Whitfield was doing his best work.

With Mickey Stevenson, he wrote Needle in a Haystack for the Velvettes.

But girls, listen to me.

Take my head five.

Girls, you better forget yourself on the right track.

For some

good things, girl, cause I find that

his

good ideas.

He wrote their classic follow-up, He Was Really Sayin' Something, with Stevenson and Eddie Holland.

And with Holland, he also wrote Too Many Fish in the Sea for the Marvellette.

Don't let him get you down.

There's the love ones around there.

Too many fish in the sea.

Too many fish in

By late 1964, Whitfield wasn't quite in the first rank of Motown songwriter producers with Holland Doja Holland and Smokey Robinson, but he was in the upper part of the second tier with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul.

And by early 1966, as we saw in the episode on My Girl, he had achieved what he'd wanted for four years, and become the Temptations' primary writer and producer.

As I said, we're going to look at Whitfield's time working with the Temptations later, but in 1966 and 1967, they were the act he was most associated with, and in particular, he collaborated with Eddie Holland on three top ten hits for the group in 1966.

But, as we discussed in the episode on I Can't Help Myself, Holland's collaborations with Whitfield eventually caused problems for Holland with his other collaborators, when he won the BMI Award for writing the most hit songs, depriving his brother and the Montdozier of their share of the award because his outside collaborations put him ahead of them.

While Whitfield could write songs by himself and had in the past, he was at his best as a collaborator.

As well as his writing partnership with Eddie Holland, he'd written with Mickey Stevenson, Marvin Gay, and Janie Bradford.

And so when Holland told him he was no longer able to work together, Whitfield started looking for someone else who could write lyrics for him, and he soon found someone.

Babett Strong had of course been the very first Motown act to have a major national hit with Money, but as we discussed in the episode on that song, he had been unable to have a follow-up hit and had actually gone back to working on an assembly line for a while.

But when you've had a hit as big as Money, working on an assembly line loses what little luster it has.

And Strong soon took himself off to New York and started hanging around the Brill building, where he hooked up with Doc Pomas and Mort Schumann, the writers of such hits as Save the Last Dance for Me, Viva Las Vegas, Sweets for My Sweet, and A Teenager in Love.

Thomas and Schuman, according to Strong, signed him to a management contract, and they got him signed to Atlantic subsidiary Atco, where he recorded one single, Seven Sins, written and produced by the team.

That was a flop, and Strong was dropped by the label.

He bounced around a few cities before before ending up in Chicago, where he signed to VJ Records and put out one more single as a performer, Make Up Your Mind, which also went nowhere.

Strong had co-written that, and as his performing career was now definitively over, he decided to move into songwriting as his main job.

He co-wrote Stay in My Corner for the Dells, which was a top 30 RB hit for them on VJ in 1965, and in a remade version in 1968, became a number one RB hit and top 10 pop hit for them.

If you stay,

stay darling,

you make me

old so far.

Stay darling, please

stay.

And on his own, he wrote another top 30 RB hit, This Heart of Mine, for the Artistics.

If you leave it with kill,

this heart of mine,

yeah,

He wrote several other songs that had some minor success in 1965 and 66, before moving back to Detroit and hooking up again with his old label, this time coming to them as a songwriter with a track record, rather than a one-hit wonder singer.

As Strong put it, They were doing my style of music then.

They were doing something a little different when I left, but they were doing the more soulful R ⁇ B style stuff, so I thought I had a place there, so I had an idea I thought I could take back and see if they could do something with it.

That idea was the first song he wrote under his new contract, and it was co-written with Norman Whitfield.

It's difficult to know how Whitfield and Strong started writing together, or much about their writing partnership, even though it was one of the most successful songwriting teams of the era, because neither man was interviewed in any great depth, and there's almost no long-form writing on either of them.

What does seem to have been the case is that both men had been aware of each other in the late 50s, when Strong was a budding RB star, and Whitfield merely a teenager hanging around watching the cool kids.

The two may even have written together before.

In an example of how the chronology for both Whitfield and Strong seems to make no sense, Whitfield had co-written a song with Marvin Gaye, Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's My Home, in 1962, when Strong was supposedly away from Motown, and it had been included as an album track on the That Stubborn Kinda Fellow album.

By the look in your eye, I can tell you're gonna cry.

Is it over me?

If it is, save your tears, for I'm not worth it, you see.

Oh, I'm the kind of guy who is

The writing on that was originally credited just to Whitfield and Gay on the labels, but it is now credited to Whitfield, Gay and Strong,

including with BMI.

Similarly, Gay's 1965 album track, Me and My Lonely Room, recorded in 1963 but held back, was initially credited to Whitfield alone, but is now credited to Whitfield and Strong, in a strange inverse of the way Money initially had Strong's credit, but it was later removed.

But whether this was an administrative decision made later, or whether Strong had been moonlighting for Motown uncredited in 1962 and collaborated with Whitfield, they hadn't been a formal writing team in the way Whitfield and Holland had been, and both later seemed to date their collaboration proper as starting in 1966 when Strong returned to Motown, and understandably.

The two songs they'd written earlier, if indeed they had, had been album filler.

But between 1967 when the first of their new collaborations came out, and 1972 when they split up, they wrote 23 top 40 hits together.

Theirs seems to have been a purely business relationship.

In the few interviews with Strong, he talks about Whitfield as someone he was friendly with.

But Whitfield's comments on Strong seem always to be the kind of very careful comment one would make about someone for whom one has a great deal of professional respect, a great deal of personal dislike, but absolutely no wish to wear the dirty laundry behind that dislike, or to burn bridges that don't need burning.

Either way, Whitfield was in need of a songwriting partner when Barrett Strong walked into a Motown rehearsal room and recognised that Strong's talents were complementary to his.

So he told Strong straight out, I've had quite a few hit records already.

If you write with me, I can guarantee you you'll make at least $100,000 a year, though he went on to emphasise that that wasn't a guarantee guarantee, and would depend on Strong putting the work in.

Strong agreed, and the first idea he brought in for his new team earned both of them more than that $100,000 by itself.

Strong had been struck by the common phrase, I heard it through the grapevine, and started singing that line over some Ray Charles-style gospel chords.

Norman Whitfield knew a hook when he heard one, and quickly started to build a full song around Strong's line.

Initially, by at least some accounts, they wanted to place the song with with the ISD brothers, who had just signed to Motown and had a hit with the Holland Doja Holland song, This Old Heart of Mine.

Always with camp and kiss to remind me of what I think.

So I jumped to the top of myself, like a cool star bread.

Pass my head stars when it goes up.

I love

For whatever reason, the ISD brothers didn't record the song, or if they did, no copy of the recording has ever surfaced, though it does seem perfectly suited to their gospel-inflected style.

The ISLs did, though, record another early Whitfield and Strong song, That's the Way Love Is, which came out in 1967 as a flop single, but would later be covered more successfully by Marvin Gaye.

Instead, the song was first recorded by The Miracles, and here the story becomes somewhat murky.

We have a recording by The Miracles, released on an album two years later, but some have suggested that that version isn't the same recording they made in 1966 when Whitfield and Strong wrote the song originally.

It certainly sounds to my ears like that is probably the version of the song the group recorded in 1966.

It sounds, frankly, like a demo for the later, more famous version.

All the main elements are there, notably the main Ray Charles-style hook played simultaneously on Hammond organ and electric piano, and the almost skanking rhythm guitar stabs.

But Smokey Robinson's vocal isn't quite passionate enough.

The tempo is slightly off, and the drums don't have the same cavernous racktom sound they have in the more famous version.

If you weren't familiar with the eventual hit, it would sound like a classic Motown track, but as it is, it's missing something.

According to at least some sources, that was presented to the Quality Control team, the team in which Whitfield had started his career, as a potential single, but they dismissed it.

It wasn't a hit, and Berry Gordy said it was one of the worst songs he'd ever heard.

But Whitfield knew the song was a hit, and so he went back into the studio and cut a new backing track.

Incidentally, no official release of the instrumental backing track for I Heard It Through the Grapevine exists, and I had to put that one together myself by taking the isolated parts someone had uploaded to YouTube and syncing them back together in editing software.

So, if there are some microsecond-level discrepancies between the instruments there, that's on me, not on the Funk Brothers.

That track was originally intended for the Temptations, with whom Whitfield was making a series of hits at the time, but they never recorded it at the time.

Whitfield did produce a version for them as an album track a couple of years later, though, so we have an idea how they might have taken the song vocally, Though by then, David Muffin had been replaced in the group by Dennis Edwards.

If it's true, please tell me, dear.

You plan to let me go

But instead of giving the song to the temptations, Whitfield kept it back for Marvin Gay, the singer with whom he'd had his first big breakthrough hit, and for whom his two previous collaborations with Strung,

if collaborations they were, had been written.

Gay and Whitfield didn't get on very well.

Indeed, it seems that Whitfield didn't get on very well with anyone.

And Gay would later complain about the occasions when Whitfield produced his records, saying, Norman and I came within a fraction of an inch of fighting.

He thought I was a prick because I wasn't about to be intimidated by him.

We clashed.

He made me sing in keys much higher than I was used to.

He had me reaching for notes that caused my throat veins to bulge.

But Gay sang the song fantastically, and Whitfield was absolutely certain they had a surefire hit.

about your plans to make me blue

with some of the guys

you knew before

between the two of us guys, you know I love you more

It took me by surprise I'm afraid

when I found out

yesterday

But once again, the quality control department refused to release the track.

Indeed, it was Barry Gordy personally who decided, against the wishes of most of the department by all accounts, that instead of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Gay's next single should be a Holland Dozier Holland track, Your Unchanging Love.

A sound like rewrite of their earlier hit for him, How Sweet It Is.

Your Unchanging Love made the top thirty, but was hardly a massive success.

Gordy has later claimed that he always liked Grapevine, but just thought it was a bit too experimental for Gay's image at the time.

But reports from others who are there say that what Gordy actually said was, it sucks.

So, I Heard It Through the Grapevine was left on the shelf, and the first fruit of the new Whitfield Strong Team to actually get released was Gonna Give Her All the Love I've Got, written for Jimmy Ruffin, the brother of Temptation's lead singer David, who had had one big hit, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, and one medium one, I've Passed This Way Before, in 1966.

Released in 1967, Gonna Give Her All the Love I've Got became Buffin's third and final hit, making number 29.

Once again,

yes, I will now.

I'm so glad I've set my time.

I'm gonna meet that girl that I left behind.

When I see her, I'm give her all the girls.

But Whitfield was still certain that grapevine could be a hit.

And then in 1967, a few months after he'd shelved Gay's version, came the record that changed everything in Seoul.

Sucker to the litterish way.

Just a little bit.

I'll get tired.

Whitfield was astounded by that record, but also became determined he was going to out-funk Aretha.

And I heard it through the grapevine grapevine was going to be the way to do it.

And he knew someone who thought she could do just that.

Gladys Knight never got on well with Aretha Franklin.

According to Knight's autobiography, this was one-sided on Franklin's part, and Knight was always friendly to Franklin.

But it's also notable that she says the same about several other of the great 60s female soul singers, though not all of them by any means.

And there seems to be a general pattern among those singers that they felt threatened by each other, and that their own position in the industry was precarious, in a way the male singers usually didn't.

But Knight claimed she always wished she got on well with Franklin because the two had such similar lives.

They'd both started out singing gospel as child performers before moving on to the Chitlin circuit at an early age, though Knight started her singing career even younger than Franklin did.

Knight was only four when she started performing solos in church, and by the age of eight, she had won the $2,000 top prize on Ted Mac's Amateur Hour by singing Vrams' lullaby and the Nat King Cole hit Too Young.

To really

be in love,

they say that love's a word,

a word we've only heard,

but

That success inspired her, and she soon formed a vocal group with her brother Bubba, sister Brenda, and their cousins William and Eleanor Guest.

They named themselves the Pips, in honour of a cousin whose nickname that was, and started performing at talent contests in Atlanta Chitlin circuit venues.

They soon got a regular gig at one of them, the Peacock, despite them all being pre-teens at the time.

The Pips also started touring and came to the attention of Maurice King, the musical director of the Flame Nightclub in Detroit, who became a vocal coach for the group.

King got the group signed to Brunswick Records, where they released their first single, a song King had written called Whistle My Love.

According to Knight, that came out in 1955 when she was 11, but most other sources have it coming out in 1958.

The group's first two singles flopped, and Vender and Alanor quit the group, being replaced by another cousin, Edward Patton, and an unrelated singer, Langston George, leaving Knight as the only girl in the quintet.

While the group weren't successful on records, they were getting a reputation live, and toured on package tours with Sam Cook, Jackie Wilson, and others.

Knight also did some solo performances with a jazz band led by her music teacher.

and started dating that band's sax player Jimmy Newman.

The group's next recording was much more successful.

They went into a makeshift studio owned by a local club owner, Fat Sunter, and recorded what they thought was a demo, a version of the Johnny Otis song, Every Beat of My Heart.

The first they knew that Huntford released that on his own small label was when they heard it on the radio.

The record was picked up by VJ Records and it ended up going to number one on the R ⁇ B charts and number six on the pop charts, but they never saw any royalties from it.

It brought them to the attention of another small label, Fury Records, which got them to re-record the song.

And that version also made the RB top 20 and got as high as number 45 on the pop charts.

However, just because they had a contract with Fury didn't mean they actually got any more money, and Knight has talked about the label's ownership being involved with gangsters.

That was the first recording to be released as by Gladys Knight and the Pips, rather than just the Pips.

and they would release a few more singles on Fury, including a second top 20 pop hit, the Don Cove song, Letter Full of Tears.

But Knight had got married to Newman, who was by now the group's musical director, after she fell pregnant when she was 16 and he was 20.

However, that first pregnancy tragically ended in miscarriage.

And when she became pregnant again, she decided to get off the road to reduce the risk.

She spent a couple of years at home having two children, while the other pips, minus George who left soon after, continued without her to little success.

But her marriage was starting to deteriorate under pressure of Newman's drug use.

They wouldn't officially divorce until 1972, but they were already feeling the pressure and would split up sooner rather than later.

And Knight returned to the stage, initially as a solo artist or duetting with Jerry Butler, but soon rejoining the Pips, who by this time were based in New York and working with the choreographer Cholly Atkins to improve their stagecraft.

For the next few years the Pips drifted from label to label, scoring one more top forty hit in 1964 with Van McCoy's giving up, but generally just getting by like so many other acts on the circuit.

Eventually, the group ended up moving to Detroit and hooking up with Motown.

where mentors like Cholly Atkins and Maurice King were already working.

At first they thought they were taking taking a step up, but they soon found that they were a lower tier Motown act, considered on a par with the spinners or the contours rather than the big act, and according to Knight they got pulled off an early Motown package tour because Diana Ross, with whom like Franklin, Knight had something of a rivalry, thought they were too good on stage and were in danger of overshadowing her.

Knight says in her autobiography that they formed a little club of our own with some of the other malcontents, with Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, and someone she refers to as Ivory Joe Hunter, Hunter, but I presume she means Ivy Joe Hunter.

One of the big problems when dealing with R ⁇ B musicians of this era is the number of people with similar names.

Ivy Joe Hunter, Joe Hunter, and Ivory Joe Hunter were all R ⁇ B musicians for whom keyboard was their primary instrument.

And both Ivy Joe and Just Playing Joe worked for Motown at different points, but Ivory Joe never did.

Norman Whitfield was also part of that group of malcontents, and he was also the producer of the Pip's first few singles for Motown, and And so when he was looking for someone to outdo Aretha, someone with something to prove, he turned to them.

He gave the group the demo tape, and they worked out a vocal arrangement for a radically different version of the song, one inspired by respect.

The third time was the charm, and Quality Control finally agreed to release I Heard It Through the Grapevine as a single.

Gladys Knight always claimed it had no promotion, but Norman Whitfield's persistence had paid off.

The single went to number two on the pop charts, kept off the top by Daydream Believer, number one on the R ⁇ B charts, and became Motown's best-selling single ever up until that point.

It also got Knight a Grammy nomination for Best R ⁇ B Vocal Performance, Female, though the Grammy Committee at least didn't think she'd outerethed Aretha, as Respect won the award.

And that, sadly, sort of summed up Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown.

They remained not quite the winners in everything.

There's no shame in being at number two behind a classic single like Daydream Believer, and certainly no shame in losing the Grammy to Aretha Franklin at her best.

But until they left Motown in 1972 and started their run of hits on Buddha Records, Gladys Knight and the Pips would always be in other people's shadow.

That even extended to I Heard It Through the Grapevine, when, as we'll hear in part two of this story, Norman Whitfield's persistence paid off, Marvin Gaye's version got released as a single, and that became the biggest selling single on Motown ever, outselling the Pips' version and making it forever his song, not theirs.

And as a final coder to the story of Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown, while they were touring off the back of Grapevine's success, the Pips ran into someone they vaguely knew from his time as a musician in the fifties, who was promoting a group he was managing made up of his sons.

Knight thought they had something, and got in touch with Motown several times trying to get them to sign the group, but she was ignored.

After a few attempts, though, Bobby Taylor of another second-tier Motown group, the Vancouvers,

also saw them and got in touch with Motown, and this time they got signed.

But that story wasn't good enough for Motown, and so neither Taylor nor Knight got the credit for discovering the group.

Instead, when Joe Jackson's sons band made their first album, it was titled Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5.

But that, of course, is a story for another time.

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that's 500 the numbers songs.com

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