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I Heard It Through the Grapevine

music by Norman Whitfield

words by Barrett Strong

A FLICK OF A TAMBOURINE over a snare-drum rimshot. It may not be the luminous opening chord to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or the pair of staccato guitar chords that start ‘Brown Sugar’ or even the wa-wa pedal that introduces Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’, but in its way this percussive upbeat is every bit as distinctive. And it heralds the keyboard’s ominous, slow march – a trudge into despair that every lover of sixties pop will instantly recognise as the beginning of ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’. Or at least Marvin Gaye’s account of the song.

In fact, Gaye’s was not the first recording. The song was written in 1966 by a pair who together would become one of the crack creative teams associated with Berry Gordy’s decade-defining Motown record label. Barrett Strong had been the singer on Gordy’s first hit, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ – later made more famous by the Beatles – and had the idea for a song that used the expression ‘heard it through the grapevine’. He took it to composer and producer Norman Whitfield and together they finished it.

Whitfield produced a recording of the song that same year with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, but Gordy felt it wasn’t strong enough to be released as a single. The following year, it was recorded by Marvin Gaye, but again Gordy was unimpressed. The first release of the song was the version by Gladys Knight & the Pips in September 1967, and it sold well. Motown eventually released Gaye’s album In the Groove nearly a year later, including his version of the song, and when radio stations began to play it Gordy was prompted finally to put it out as a single. It became a worldwide hit – so much so that the album itself had to be re-released, its title changed to I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Gordy’s complaints seem to have hinged on the song’s tempo – he wanted a dance number (in spite of the lyrics about a doomed relationship) – and Gladys Knight’s radically different recording delivered that. Knight’s version is pure call-and-response soul, the trudge replaced with funky percussion licks, and while Whitfield couldn’t bring himself to dispense with the piano figure altogether, it is relegated to a lesser role, appearing at the end of each verse and taking us from C major, briefly to C minor, even as the soul-funk rhythms continue all around it. The record is clearly an attempt to cash in on the success of Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’, but while the performance is fine, it is totally unsuited to the material.

Like the Miracles’ recording, Gaye’s is slow and sultry. Both are performed in E flat minor – a key with six flats that allows a pianist to use mostly black notes – and both make much use of that inexorable trudge. There is so much to admire on Gaye’s recording. Take the first twenty seconds alone. Following the percussive anacrusis and piano, the production gradually adds bass guitar and bass drum (b-boom, b-boom, like a nervous heartbeat), then hi-hat, a shaken tambourine, an electric guitar, a horn section, and finally tom-toms as Gaye’s voice enters, at first wordlessly, like the final instrument in the build-up: ‘Oo-oo, I bet you’re wonderin’ how I knew …’

Now it’s down to Gaye himself, joined by a string section from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and there, in the second line of the song, is a masterstroke. In the line ‘With some other guy that you knew before’, he places the word ‘guy’ on a high, falsetto E flat. He’s trying to remain cool, this man, as he confronts his faithless woman, but this abrupt jump up an octave is like a window to his grief. Beneath the calm exterior he is beside himself – in vocal terms, literally so. He repeats the effect in the second verse on ‘you’ in the line ‘Losin’ you would end my life you see’ and again in the third verse on ‘help’ – it’s always on a key word – and each time it’s like a cry of pain.

This isn’t the only aspect of the song that is coloured by vocal tessitura. Falsetto is one thing, but the entire song is high in Gaye’s voice – too high, in fact. It may, of course, simply have been that this was the key that suited Smokey Robinson and Whitfield failed to transpose it for Gaye. But he was too canny a producer for that. On this record, Whitfield takes Gaye out of his vocal comfort zone. If he is a man in distress, so he should sound like one.

The effect is expressive and powerful, and together Whitfield and Gaye created a pop masterpiece. When Creedence Clearwater Revival included an eleven-minute version of the song on their 1970 album Cosmo’s Factory, they retained most of the basic features of Gaye’s record: a semitone lower, John Fogerty recreates both the high tessitura and the falsetto wails. In their otherwise quite different versions, both the Slits (in 1979) and the Flying Pickets (in 1984) did the same.

We haven’t even mentioned Ike and Tina Turner’s up-tempo version, or Human Nature’s faithful (if hi-tech) copy, or Bill Frisell’s typically deconstructive approach, or Jessica Mauboy’s performance in the film The Sapphires, which takes us back to Gladys Knight. There are plenty of others, too, and so the question arises: what and where is the song itself? Which is the authoritative version? What is the song’s provenance?

It’s easy enough to answer this question in the context of the classical tradition. There are dozens of recordings of most of Schubert’s songs and there must have been many thousands of performances of them. Had Schubert composed ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, any tenor or soprano could turn to the sheet music to check their interpretation against the composer’s wishes. Had Mahler composed a symphonic movement entitled ‘What the Grapevine Tells Me’, a conductor would find the authority for his or her performance in the full score. In classical music, a text is a text, maybe even an urtext. But in pop music, as in jazz, each recording is a new text. Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ may have more currency than other texts of the same name, but unlike a score by Schubert or Mahler, it doesn’t tell the next performer what to do. A recording stamps a vocal personality on a song (to say nothing of the producer’s personality), and the ebb and flow of sonic details – the timbre of voice and instruments, the mix, the added reverb – become a part of these texts as much as the words and the music.