For those who havenât heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ. This week we take a short look at the songâs writers, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the first released version by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In two weeks time weâll take a longer look at the sixties career of the songâs most famous performer, Marvin Gaye. This episode is quite a light one. That one⊠wonât be.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on âBend Me Shape Meâ by Amen Corner.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
Resources
Mixcloud will be up with the next episode.
For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, Iâve used the following resources:
Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.
To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordyâs own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography.
Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown.
I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown.
The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motownâs thirty-year history.
Motown: The Golden Years is another Motown encyclopaedia.
And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles.
For information on Marvin Gaye, and his relationship with Norman Whitfield, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. Iâve also used information on Whitfield in  Ainât Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky,
Iâve also referred to interviews with Whitfield and Strong archived at rocksbackpages.com , notably âThe Norman Whitfield interviewâ, John Abbey, Blues & Soul, 1 February 1977
For information about Gladys Knight, Iâve used her autobiography.
The best collection of Gladys Knight and the Pipsâ music is this 3-CD set, but the best way to hear Motown hits is in the context of other Motown hits. This five-CD box set contains the first five in the Motown Chartbusters series of British compilations. The Pipsâ version of âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ is on disc 2, while Marvin Gayeâs is on disc 3, which is famously generally considered one of the best single-disc various artists compilations ever.
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Transcript
Before I start, a brief note â 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. Sheâd 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 â two thousand five hundred miles â to attend the old ladyâs 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 Normanâs aunt was not only willing to put the family up for a while, but her husband was able to give Normanâs father a job in his drug store 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 cityâs nightlife, and soon as well as going to school he was working an evening job at a petrol station â but that was only to supplement the money he made as a pool hustler.
Young Norman Whitfield 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 â in particular with Popcorn and the Mohawks, a band led by Popcorn Wylie.
[Excerpt: Popcorn and the Mohawks, âShimmy Gullyâ]
Popcorn and the Mohawks were a band of serious jazz musicians, many of whom, including Wylie himself, went on to be members of the Funk Brothers, the team of session players that played on Motownâs hits â though Wylie 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 wasnât 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 â 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 wasnât 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 Gordyâs ex-mother-in-law and named after Gordyâs first wife, who he had recently divorced.
Of all the great Motown songwriters and producers, Whitfieldâs 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 â 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, Ge Ge, which might have operated earlier â 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 âAloneâ by Tommy Storm on Thelma Records, but that record seems not to exist â 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 Ge Ge Records, âThis Love I Have For Youâ, is a rewrite of that song by Don Davis, Thelmaâs head of A&R, though the credit on the label for that is just to Davis and Ron Abner, another member of the group:
[Excerpt: The Fabulous Peps, âThis Love I Have For Youâ]
So that might, or might not, be the first Norman Whitfield song ever to be released.
The other song often credited as Whitfieldâs first released song is âAnswer Meâ by Richard Street and the Distants â Street was another member of the Fabulous Peps, but weâve encountered him and the Distants before when talking about the Temptations â the Distants were the group that Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Al Bryant had been in before forming the Temptations â 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 Whitfieldâs first official credit as a songwriter:
[Excerpt: Richard Street and the Distants, âAnswer Meâ]
He was soon writing songs for a lot of small labels â most of which appear to have been recorded by the Thelma team and then licensed out â like âIâve Gotten Over Youâ by the Sonnettes:
[Excerpt: The Sonnettes, âIâve Gotten Over Youâ]
That was on KO Records, distributed by Scepter, and was a minor local hit â enough to finally bring Whitfield to the attention of Berry Gordy. According to many sources, Whitfield had been hanging around Hitsville for months trying to get a job with the label, but as he told the story in 1977 âBerry 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.â
Thatâs not quite how the story went. According to everyone else, he was constantly hanging around Hitsville, 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 Motownâs quality control department for fifteen dollars 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 wasnât Marvin Gaye, as Whitfield would later tell the story, but was in fact for the far less prestigious Mickey Woods â possibly the single least-known artist of Motownâs early years. Woods was a white teenager, the first white male solo artist signed to Motown, who released two novelty teen-pop singles. Whitfieldâs first Motown song was the B-side to Woodsâ second single, a knock-off of Sam Cookeâs âCupidâ called âThey Call Me Cupidâ, co-written with Berry Gordy and Brian Holland:
[Excerpt: Mickey Woods, âThey Call Me Cupidâ]
Unsurprisingly that didnât set the world on fire, and Whitfield didnât get another Motown label credit for thirteen 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 â and, for the first time, sole producer â of the first single for a new singer, Kim Weston:
[Excerpt: Kim Weston, âIt Should Have Been Meâ]
As it turned out, that wasnât a hit, but the flip-side, âLove Me All The Wayâ, co-written by Stevenson (who was also Westonâs husband) and Barney Ales, did become a minor hit, making the R&B top thirty.
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, âThe Further You Look, The Less You Seeâ:
[Excerpt: The Temptations, âThe Further You Look, The Less You Seeâ]
That was co-written with Smokey Robinson, and as we heard in the episode on âMy Girlâ, 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 groupâs singles for the next couple of years, but Whitfield would eventually take over from him. Whitfieldâs 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 Iâm going to save discussion of Whitfieldâs work with the group until we get to 1972, so bear with me if I seem to skim over that â and if I repeat myself in a couple of years when we get there.
Whitfieldâs first major success, though, was also the first top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, âPride and Joyâ:
[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, âPride and Joyâ]
âPride and Joyâ had actually been written and recorded before the Kim Weston and Temptations tracks, and was intended as album filler â it was written during a session by Whitfield, Gaye, 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, âHitch-Hikeâ, we covered in the previous episode on Gaye, but that was successful enough that an album, That Stubborn Kinda Fellow, was released, with âPride and Joyâ on it. A few months later Gaye recut his lead vocal, over the same backing track, and the record was released as a single, reaching number ten on the pop charts and number two R&B:
[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, âPride and Joyâ]
Whitfield had other successes as well, often as B-sides. âThe Girlâs Alright With Meâ, the B-side to Smokey Robinsonâs hit for the Temptations âIâll Be In Troubleâ, went to number forty on the R&B chart in its own right:
[Excerpt: The Temptations, âThe Girlâs Alright With Meâ]
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 â âI Couldnât Cry if I Wanted Toâ 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:
[Excerpt: Eddie Holland, âI Couldnât Cry if I Wanted Toâ]
Whitfield was very much a B-side kind of songwriter and producer at this point â 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 âno-hit Supremesâ, âHe Means the World to Meâ, which was left on the shelf until they needed a B-side eighteen months later and pulled it out and released it:
[Excerpt: The Supremes, âHe Means the World to Meâ]
But the track that that was a B-side to was âWhere Did Our Love Go?â, 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 âWhere Did Our Love Go?â than Holland, Dozier, or Holland, because he got a hundred percent of the songwritersâ 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 Temptations A-side for the first time, with âGirl, (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)â:
[Excerpt: The Temptations, âGirl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)â]
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 âNeedle in a Haystackâ for the Velvettes:
[Excerpt: The Velvettes, âNeedle in a Haystackâ]
He wrote their classic followup âHe Was Really Sayinâ Somethinââ with Stevenson and Eddie Holland, and with Holland he also wrote âToo Many Fish in the Seaâ for the Marvelettes:
[Excerpt: The Marvelettes, âToo Many Fish In The Seaâ]
By late 1964, Whitfield wasnât quite in the first rank of Motown songwriter-producers with Holland-Dozier-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 âMy Girlâ, he had achieved what heâd wanted for four years, and become the Temptationsâ primary writer and producer.
As I said, weâre going to look at Whitfieldâs time working with the Temptations later, but in 1966 and 67 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 âI Canât Help Myselfâ, Hollandâs 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 Lamont Dozier 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 â as well as his writing partnership with Eddie Holland heâd written with Mickey Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, 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:
[Excerpt: Barrett Strong, âMoneyâ]
Barrett Strong had, of course, been the very first Motown act to have a major national hit, with âMoneyâ, 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 youâve had a hit as big as âMoneyâ, working on an assembly line loses what little lustre it has, and Strong soon took himself off to New York and started hanging around the Brill Building, where he hooked up with Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, the writers of such hits as âSave the Last Dance for Meâ, âViva Las Vegasâ, âSweets for My Sweetâ, and âA Teenager in Loveâ. Pomus and Shuman, according to Strong, signed him to a management contract, and they got him signed to Atlanticâs subsidiary Atco, where he recorded one single, âSeven Sinsâ, written and produced by the team:
[Excerpt: Barrett Strong, âSeven Sinsâ]
That was a flop, and Strong was dropped by the label. He bounced around a few cities before ending up in Chicago, where he signed to VeeJay Records and put out one more single as a performer, âMake Up Your Mindâ, which also went nowhere:
[Excerpt: Barrett Strong, âMake Up Your Mindâ]
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 âStay in My Cornerâ for the Dells, which was a top thirty R&B hit for them on VeeJay in 1965 and in a remade version in 1968 became a number one R&B hit and top ten pop hit for them:
[Excerpt: The Dells, âStay in My Cornerâ]
And on his own he wrote another top thirty R&B hit, âThis Heart of Mineâ, for the Artistics:
[Excerpt: The Artistics, âThis Heart of Mineâ]
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 âThey 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.â
That idea was the first song he wrote under his new contract, and it was co-written with Norman Whitfield. Itâs 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 thereâs 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 fifties, when Strong was a budding R&B star and Whitfield merely a teenager hanging round watching the cool kids.
The two may even have written together before â in an example of how the chronology for both Whitfield and Strong seems to make no sense, Whitfield had cowritten a song with Marvin Gaye, âWherever I Lay My Hat, Thatâs My Homeâ, in 1962 â when Strong was supposedly away from Motown â and it had been included as an album track on the That Stubborn Kinda Fellow album:
[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, âWherever I Lay My Hat, Thatâs My Homeâ]
The writing on that was originally credited just to Whitfield and Gaye on the labels, but it is now credited to Whitfield, Gaye, and Strong, including with BMI. Similarly Gayeâs 1965 album track âMe and My Lonely Roomâ â recorded in 1963 but held back â was initially credited to Whitfield alone but is now credited to Whitfield and Strong, in a strange inverse of the way âMoneyâ initially had Strongâs 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 hadnât 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 â and understandably. The two songs theyâd written earlier â if indeed they had â had been album filler, but between 1967 when the first of their new collaborations came out and 1972 when they split up, they wrote twenty-three top forty hits together.
Theirs seems to have been a purely business relationship â in the few interviews with Strong he talks about Whitfield as someone he was friendly with, but Whitfieldâs comments on Strong seem always to be the kind of very careful comments 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 air the dirty laundry behind that dislike, or to burn bridges that donât need burning.
Either way, Whitfield was in need of a songwriting partner when Barrett Strong walked into a Motown rehearsal room, and recognised that Strongâs talents were complementary to his. So he told Strong, straight out, âIâve had quite a few hit records already. If you write with me, I can guarantee you youâll make at least a hundred thousand dollars a yearâ â though he went on to emphasise that that wasnât 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 hundred thousand dollars by itself. Strong had been struck by the common phrase âI heard it through the grapevineâ, 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 Strongâs line.
Initially, by at least some accounts, they wanted to place the song with the Isley Brothers, who had just signed to Motown and had a hit with the Holland-Dozier-Holland song âThis Old Heart of Mineâ:
[Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, âThis Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You)â]
For whatever reason, the Isley Brothers didnât 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 Isleys did, though, record another early Whitfield and Strong song, âThatâs the Way Love Isâ, which came out in 1967 as a flop single, but would later be covered more successfully by Marvin Gaye:
[Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, âThatâs the Way Love Isâ]
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 isnât the same recording they made in 1966 when Whitfield and Strong wrote the song originally:
[Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ]
It certainly sounds to my ears like that is probably the version of the song the group recorded in 66 â it sounds, frankly, like a demo for the later, more famous version. All the main elements are there â notably the main Ray Charles style hook played simultaneously on Hammond organ and electric piano, and the almost skanking rhythm guitar stabs â but Smokey Robinsonâs vocal isnât *quite* passionate enough, the tempo is slightly off, and the drums donât have the same cavernous rack tom sound that they have in the more famous version.
If you werenât familiar with the eventual hit, it would sound like a classic Motown track, but as it is itâs missing somethingâŠ
[Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ]
According to at least some sources, that was presented to the quality control team â the team in which Whitfield had started his career, as a potential single, but they dismissed it. It wasnât a hit, and Berry Gordy said it was one of the worst songs heâd ever heard. But Whitfield knew the song was a hit, and so he went back into the studio and cut a new backing track:
[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, âI Heard it Through the Grapevine (backing track only)â]
(Incidentally, no official release of the instrumental backing track for âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ exists, and I had to put that one together myself by taking the isolated parts someone had uploaded to youtube and synching them back together in editing software, so if there are some microsecond-level discrepancies between the instruments there, thatâs 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 â though by then David Ruffin had been replaced in the group by Dennis Edwards:
[Excerpt: The Temptations, âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ]
But instead of giving the song to the Temptations, Whitfield kept it back for Marvin Gaye, the singer with whom heâd had his first big breakthrough hit and for whom his two previous collaborations with Strong â if collaborations they were â had been written. Gaye and Whitfield didnât get on very well â indeed, it seems that Whitfield didnât get on very well with *anyone* â and Gaye would later complain about the occasions when Whitfield produced his records, saying âNorman and I came within a fraction of an inch of fighting. He thought I was a prick because I wasnât 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.â
But Gaye sang the song fantastically, and Whitfield was absolutely certain they had a sure-fire hit:
[Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ]
But once again the quality control department refused to release the track. Indeed, it was Berry Gordy personally who decided, against the wishes of most of the department by all accounts, that instead of âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ Gayeâs next single should be a Holland-Dozier-Holland track, âYour Unchanging Loveâ, a soundalike rewrite of their earlier hit for him, âHow Sweet It Isâ. âYour Unchanging Loveâ made the top thirty, but was hardly a massive success. Gordy has later claimed that he always liked âGrapevineâ but just thought it was a bit too experimental for Gayeâs image at the time, but reports from others who were there say that what Gordy actually said was âit sucksâ.
So âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ was left on the shelf, and the first fruit of the new Whitfield/Strong team to actually get released was âGonna Give Her All the Love Iâve Gotâ, written for Jimmy Ruffin, the brother of Temptations lead singer David, who had had one big hit, âWhat Becomes of the Brokenheartedâ and one medium one, âIâve Passed This Way Beforeâ, in 1966. Released in 1967, âGonna Give Her All the Love Iâve Gotâ became Ruffinâs third and final hit, making number 29:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Ruffin, âGonna Give Her All the Love Iâve Gotâ]
But Whitfield was still certain that âGrapevineâ could be a hit. And then in 1967, a few months after heâd shelved Gayeâs version, came the record that changed everything in soul:
[Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, âRespectâ]
Whitfield was astounded by that record, but also became determined he was going to âout-funk Arethaâ, and âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ 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 Knightâs autobiography this was one-sided on Franklinâs part, and Knight was always friendly to Franklin, but itâs also notable that she says the same about several other of the great sixties 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 didnât.
But Knight claimed she always *wished* she got on well with Franklin, because the two had such similar lives. Theyâd 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 two thousand dollar top prize on Ted Mackâs Amateur Hour by singing Brahmsâ âLullabyâ and the Nat âKingâ Cole hit âToo Youngâ:
[Excerpt: Nat âKingâ Cole, âToo Youngâ]
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 Chitlinâ 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 âWhistle My Loveâ:
[Excerpt: The Pips, âWhistle My Loveâ]
According to Knight that came out in 1955, when she was eleven, but most other sources have it coming out in 1958.
The groupâs first two singles flopped, and Brenda and Eleanor quit the group, being replaced by another cousin, Edward Patten, and an unrelated singer Langston George, leaving Knight as the only girl in the quintet.
While the group werenât successful on records, they were getting a reputation live and toured on package tours with Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and others. Knight also did some solo performances with a jazz band led by her music teacher, and started dating that bandâs sax player, Jimmy Newman.
The groupâs next recording was much more successful. They went into a makeshift studio owned by a local club owner, Fats Hunter, and recorded what they thought was a demo, a version of the Johnny Otis song âEvery Beat of My Heartâ:
[Excerpt: The Pips, âEvery Beat of My Heart (HunTom version)â]
The first they knew that Hunter had released that on his own small label was when they heard it on the radio. The record was picked up by VeeJay 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 rerecord the song, and that version *also* made the R&B top twenty and got as high as number forty-five on the pop charts:
[Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, âEvery Beat of My Heart (Fury version)â]
However, just because they had a contract with Fury didnât mean they actually got any more money, and Knight has talked about the labelâs ownership being involved with gangsters.
That was the first recording to be released as by âGladys Knight and the Pipsâ, rather than just The Pips, and they would release a few more singles on Fury, including a second top twenty pop hit, the Don Covay song âLetter Full of Tearsâ:
[Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, âLetter Full of Tearsâ]
But Knight had got married to Newman, who was by now the groupâs musical director, after she fell pregnant when she was sixteen and he was twenty. 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 â minus George who left soon after â continued without her to little success.
But her marriage was starting to deteriorate under pressure of Newmanâs drug use â they wouldnât officially divorce until 1972, but they were already feeling the pressure, and would split up sooner rather than later â 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 McCoyâs âGiving Upâ, 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 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 acts, 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 âformed a little club of our own with some of the other malcontentsâ with Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, and someone she refers to as âIvory Joe Hunterâ but I presume she means Ivy Jo Hunter (one of the big problems when dealing with R&B musicians of this era is the number of people with similar names. Ivy Jo Hunter, Joe Hunter, and Ivory Joe Hunter were all R&B musicians for whom keyboard was their primary instrument, and both Ivy Jo and just plain Joe worked for Motown at different points, but Ivory Joe never did)
Norman Whitfield was also part of that group of âmalcontentsâ, and he was also the producer of the Pipsâ first few singles for Motown, 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 âRespectâ:
[Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ]
The third time was the charm, and quality control finally agreed to release âI Heard it Through the Grapevineâ as a single. Gladys Knight always claimed it had no promotion, but Norman Whitfieldâs persistence had paid off â the single went to number two on the pop charts (kept off the top by âDaydream Believerâ), number one on the R&B charts, and became Motownâs biggest-selling single *ever* up until that point. It also got Knight a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female â though the Grammy committee, at least, didnât think sheâd out-Arethaâd Aretha, as âRespectâ won the award.
And that, sadly, sort of summed up Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown â they remained not quite the winners in everything. Thereâs no shame in being at number two behind a classic single like âDaydream Believerâ, 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 Buddah records, Gladys Knight and the Pips would always be in other peopleâs shadow.
That even extended to âI Heard It Through the Grapevineâ when, as weâll hear in part two of this story, Norman Whitfieldâs persistence paid off, Marvin Gayeâs 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 coda to the story of Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown, while they were touring off the back of âGrapevineâsâ 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 wasnât good enough for Motown, and so neither Taylor nor Knight got the credit for discovering the group. Instead when Joe Jacksonâs sonsâ band made their first album, it was titled Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5.
But that, of course, is a story for another timeâŠ
Transcript
The next proper episode will be up in a couple of days â Iâm recording it tonight â but I just wanted to make a brief announcement. It has recently been brought to my attention that the French language podcast Un dernier disque avant la fin du monde has, for nearly two years, been making French-language versions of my podcast without giving me credit (the episodes before that donât seem to be ripped off from me), and has been monetising them on Patreon â including making his own French-language versions of some of my Patreon bonuses. This is not a case of someone just taking inspiration from my work. Itâs not someone doing episodes on the same songs and possibly leaning a little too heavily on me as a source. That kind of thing is forgivable. This is someone who has been doing word-for-word translations, without my permission, and without crediting me or even notifying me, and posting them as his own work. As far as my schoolboy French indicates heâs not even lightly paraphrasing. He clearly listens to my podcast, so I am going to give him until Monday to take all those episodes down and post an apology before I contact a lawyer. Iâm posting this publicly so that anyone who has been listening to his show and wondering about the similarity, or listening in the belief I authorised his work, knows that this is the work of a plagiarist, not something Iâve endorsed in any way. And if anyone *wants* to do translated versions of my work, they can contact me and make proper arrangements. I put too much time and effort into my job to have someone pass my work off as theirs without a fight.For those who havenât heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song âAll Along the Watchtowerâ. Part one was on the original version by Bob Dylan, while this part is on Jimi Hendrixâs cover version.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on âGames People Playâ by Joe South.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
Errata: I mispronounce Ed Chalpinâs name as Halpin for most of the episode. And towards the end I say âJanuary the 28th 1969â when I meant 1970
For those who havenât heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first of a two-episode look at the song âAll Along the Watchtowerâ. This one is on the original version by Bob Dylan, while part two will be on Jimi Hendrixâs cover version.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on âAliceâs Restaurant Massacreeâ by Arlo Guthrie.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
For those who havenât heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the fourth and final part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock, this time mostly focused on what Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman did after leaving the band.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on âThe Dark End of the Streetâ by James Carr.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
For those who havenât heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on âFireâ by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
For those who havenât heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on âWith a Little Help From My Friendsâ by Joe Cocker.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
For those who havenât heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode on âMy World Fell Downâ by Sagittarius.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (moreâŠ)
This is just a brief announcement. The fact that Iâve released stuff so inconsistently over the last year, along with the last episode being so long that it actually caused problems for Tiltâs editing softwaere has caused me to reconsider how Iâm breaking these episodes up.
I have had very good reasons for making the episodes longer rather than doing multiple parts â we would have had episodes titled âWhite Light/White Heatâ, âEight Miles Highâ, and âGood Vibrationsâ which literally didnât mention at all the bands they were ostensibly about, and people would have got very annoyed at listening to an episode supposedly about the Beach Boys and finding it was entirely about a Soviet inventor in the 1920s. But the balance has tipped the other way now. Things have got a bit ridiculous.
So what Iâm doing npw is Iâm still writing the scripts the same way I always do, as one long narrative, but then once a script is finished I will break it into sections of about 5-10,000 words (somewhere in the 45-minute to ninety minute range) depending on where natural cliffhangers come, and I will release those parts fortnightly. There still might be gaps between the last part of the previous song and the first part of the next, but probably nothing like as long as they have been.
The actual content will still be the same â just for example the Velvet Underground episode would have been split into three or four parts, with the first part ending with John Cale joining the story, and me saying âjoin us in two weeks timeâ. But itâll be broken up into more manageable parts which hopefully wonât cause Tiltâs editing software to explode, and if you like listening to it all in one go you can just wait until the final part of that story and then listen to it all.
So today youâre going to get, not âEpisode 172, âHickory Windâ by the Byrdsâ, but âSONG 172: âHickory Windâ by the Byrds: Part 1, Ushering in a New Dimensionâ, and then Song 172 part two two weeks later.
I want to emphasise that this will still be *exactly the same content* as it would otherwise be. The stories will go on as long as they need to. Some will be a single episode, some will be three or four. But breaking it up like this should mean you get more consistent releases and I can get ahead. Indeed, it *might* mean I could go back to weekly episodes â Iâve averaged somewhere in the region of thirty thousand words per month last year on the main podcast, which would be four seven-thousand-word episodes â but I wonât even think about that unless I start to actually build up a backlog.
The stories should be getting shorter anyway as we finally move out of the late sixties, so the rate of storytelling *should* get faster, but this way at least youâre going to get regular episodes. So listen to todayâs episode, and then join me again in precisely two weeks as Gram Parsons joins the story.
Episode 171 looks at âHey Judeâ, the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on âI Love Youâ by People!.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at âAstral Weeksâ, the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on âStoned Soul Picnicâ by Laura Nyro.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tiltâs irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
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