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Remembering when Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell made beautiful music and topped the R&B chart for August 31, 1968 with ‘You’re All I Need To Get By.’Marvin Gaye was on fire in 1968. The Motown star had been having hits for six years, and had topped the US R&B charts twice already, both times in 1965. But in the year that he turned 29, there was no stopping him. Gaye had three Billboard Soul No.1s in the space of six months in 1968, two of them with one of his great duet partners, Tammi Terrell, who would tragically die of...

youtube.com/watch?v=7DulLDLzsF4Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On? (YouTube at the click) occurred at a different point in the cycle of manipulation of powerlessness, rage and scapegoating in his time than we are now at in our cycle within cycles. We are suffering from much more oppressive "partisan 'tolerance' " (some freedom of expression more "equal" than others) absolutely forbidding any dissent, than people were in Marvin's time, exhausted by successive tsunamis of violence and disillusionment, JFK, MLK, RFK, Chicago 1968, Viet Nam, Watergate brewing in 1971. So Marvin asked them for self-reflection, What's Goin' On?Today's fomenters of dissatisfaction and alienation keep up...

For the last year and a half, the music industry has been gripped by a lawsuit over whether Robin Thicke’s 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” was merely reminiscent of a song by Marvin Gaye, or had crossed the line into plagiarism.

Marvin Gaye was tragically shot by his own father on this day, April 1st, 1984...  Twenty-seven years ago today gifted R-n-B singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and record producer Marvin Gaye was killed in a family argument, shot with a gun he had given his father just four months previous.The elder stood trail for the crime, but was sentenced only to probation once the fact that his son had beat him up prior to the shooting came to light. The DC native -born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr.- had great difficulties with the ups and  downs of show business, suffering from depression and...