It is one of the strangest stories in Motown history: the label’s biggest hit of the sixties was recorded three times, rejected twice, and released by the act its own boss believed in least. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was cut first by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, then by Marvin Gaye — and both versions were shelved by Berry Gordy himself. It took Gladys Knight and the Pips, the family group Motown treated as its B-team, to drag the song out of the vault and turn it into a smash. And when Marvin’s version finally came out a year later and went even bigger, it set off one of the great friendly rivalries in soul music — and proved that sometimes the boss is wrong about everything.
This is the story of a song nobody wanted — until everybody did.
The Forty-Dollar Piano
It started with a broken piano. In 1966, Motown songwriter Barrett Strong — the man who had sung the label’s breakout hit “Money (That’s What I Want)” before Berry Gordy hired him as a staff writer when a follow-up smash never came — was hammering out chord changes on a forty-dollar piano that had only ten working keys. He was chasing a feel he’d gotten from Ray Charles records, something bluesy and brooding. He took the idea to the famous Holland-Dozier-Holland team and asked them to collaborate. They refused to share a credit with another writer — egos, egos everywhere — so Strong found a different partner: up-and-coming producer Norman Whitfield, fresh off the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”
Whitfield matched Strong’s tune to a lyric about a lover tortured by rumors and lies — whispers traveling, as the old saying goes, through the grapevine. It was a great song. Berry Gordy, hearing the first version, thought it was horrible. That disagreement would shape the next two years of Motown history.
Take One: Smokey Says No — Well, Berry Does
Whitfield and Strong first gave “Grapevine” to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. They recorded it in August 1966 — the very first version of the song ever cut, all smooth Miracles harmonies over Strong and Whitfield’s brooding changes. And Berry Gordy vetoed its release. He called it unsuitable, not commercial enough, wrong for the label’s pop direction — the man who had built an empire on instinct suddenly couldn’t hear a hit when it was sung directly into his ear. The recording sat in the Motown vaults, unheard, until it finally surfaced on the Miracles’ 1968 album “Special Occasion” — two years late to its own party, and by then the whole world was singing somebody else’s version.
Strong and Whitfield refused to give up on the song. If the boss didn’t like the first version, they’d cut a second one. (There was even a version by the Isley Brothers in between — cut, and like the others, left unreleased. The song was becoming Motown’s most-recorded reject.) They turned to one of Motown’s brightest stars — and Whitfield’s former collaborator — Marvin Gaye.
Take Two: Marvin’s Masterpiece Goes in the Drawer
The Marvin Gaye sessions began on April 10, 1967, and they were like nothing Hitsville had seen. The recording took more than a month to produce — an eternity at Motown, where hits were routinely cut in a day. Whitfield oversaw take after take, layering overdubs with obsessive care: the Andantes on background vocals, Earl Van Dyke on Hammond organ, Johnny Griffith on Wurlitzer electric piano, James Jamerson on bass, Jack Ashford on percussion, Pistol Allen and Uriel Jones on drums, and a string arrangement by Paul Riser. Whitfield pushed Gaye to sing in a high, rasping register — the same trick that had worked on David Ruffin’s “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” — and Gaye, after arguing about it, delivered a vocal of fierce, pleading intensity.
It was a masterpiece. And Berry Gordy shelved it. Too bluesy, he said. Not commercial enough. The man who had built Motown on gut instinct had a blind spot, and its name was “Grapevine.” Whitfield was furious but undeterred. If Gordy wouldn’t release the brooding version, Whitfield would give him a version he couldn’t refuse — by turning the song inside out.
Take Three: Gladys Goes to Church
Whitfield’s new idea was bold: recast “Grapevine” as an uptempo gospel shouter for Gladys Knight and the Pips. He said he was trying to “out-funk” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” — to take the Queen of Soul’s church-fired energy and aim it at Motown’s own roster. Gladys Knight, the Empress in waiting, was the perfect vessel: a church singer with a world-class instrument and a perfectionist’s work ethic.
Whitfield and the group spent weeks honing the vocal arrangement before they ever rolled tape — Gladys was famous for her hard work and extreme perfectionism, and she gave this session everything she had. When they finally recorded it in June 1967, the band was Motown’s A-team: Earl Van Dyke on piano, James Jamerson on bass, Benny Benjamin and Uriel Jones on drums — that opening ride-cymbal part, those thunderous fills. And Gladys, testifying over the top of it all like the song was a sermon and the studio was a sanctuary, with Bubba, William, and Edward weaving those impossibly tight family harmonies behind her. It was a completely different arrangement from the Miracles’ and Marvin’s versions — faster, harder, funkier, a gospel-rock barnstormer built for a voice that had been waiting its whole career for a song this big.
The third version recorded. Now Whitfield had to get it released — and that meant going back into the lion’s den to face the man who had already said no twice.
The Reluctant Release
After lots and lots of conversation — Whitfield lobbying, Gordy resisting — Berry Gordy finally, reluctantly agreed to let Knight’s “Grapevine” out as a single. It was issued on September 28, 1967, on Motown’s Soul label. The label put very little promotional muscle behind it; as far as Hitsville was concerned, this was a B-team record by a B-team act.
Gladys Knight and the Pips had something better than promotion: relationships. The group had been touring since childhood — Gladys was sixteen when they cut their first single — and knew disc jockeys across the country personally. They worked the record themselves, city by city, DJ by DJ, the way they had worked every record since the broken record player at Bubba’s birthday party. And the song did the rest. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” shot up the charts — number one on the R&B chart for six weeks, number one on the Cash Box Top 100, and number two on the Billboard Hot 100, held off the top spot only by the Beatles. It became Motown’s biggest-selling single up to that point in the label’s history.
The group Motown had considered second-string had just given the label its biggest hit ever — with a song the boss had rejected twice.
The Revenge of the Vault
Whitfield was thrilled with Knight’s success. But he still believed Marvin’s shelved version had an even bigger hit in it, and he wouldn’t let it go. He kept lobbying Gordy to release it. Gordy kept refusing — he didn’t want to put out the same song so soon after it had been a hit for Gladys and the Pips. In his autobiography, Gordy recalled the breaking point: “I told Norman it was too late. It would be crazy to release the same song so soon.” Barrett Strong remembered it more colorfully: Gordy told Whitfield, “Get out of my face. Mention that record again and you’re fired!”
Gordy finally relented — barely. He agreed to stick Marvin’s version on Gaye’s 1968 album “In the Groove” as filler. That should have been the end of it. Instead, it was the beginning. A disc jockey in Chicago started playing the album cut instead of the single Motown was pushing, “Your Unchanging Love.” The phones lit up. Radio stations across the country followed suit. Within weeks, Motown had retitled the album “I Heard It Through the Grapevine!” and rushed Marvin’s version out as a single on October 30, 1968 — a full year after Gladys’s release.
What happened next is Motown legend. Marvin Gaye’s “Grapevine” hit number one on the pop, R&B, and Cash Box charts simultaneously and stayed at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, from December 1968 into January 1969 — the whole country humming the same rumor. It became the biggest-selling single in Motown’s history to that point, eclipsing even Gladys’s triumph, and it turned Marvin Gaye from a star into an institution. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. And Gladys’s version got its own immortality: in 2018, the Pips’ recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame too — the rare song honored twice, for two different miracles, by two different voices.
Two Versions, One Song — Then a Third
The song wasn’t done. In 1970, Creedence Clearwater Revival put an eleven-minute, swamp-rock version of “Grapevine” on their number-one album “Cosmo’s Factory,” and it became an FM radio staple — a third definitive reading, all churning guitars and John Fogerty’s bayou howl, as different from Marvin’s velvet menace as Marvin’s was from Gladys’s church fire. Three versions, three genres, three smashes, one song. How many compositions in popular music can claim that?
So who won the Grapevine wars? Everybody. Smokey’s version, the one Gordy called horrible, finally saw daylight and became a beloved deep cut. Marvin’s version became his signature, the brooding masterpiece that defined his late-sixties peak. Creedence took it to the rock underground. And Gladys’s version — the one nobody wanted to release — was the first, the fastest, the funkiest, and the proof that the “B-team” could out-sing anybody on the roster.
There’s a lovely coda. Gladys Knight has always been generous about Marvin’s triumph, and Motown lore holds no bitterness between them — just two great singers who happened to share a great song. But the history books should record what the charts proved in 1967: when Berry Gordy didn’t believe in a song, and didn’t believe in the group singing it, Gladys Knight and the Pips believed enough for everyone. They took a rejected song, worked it city by city, and made it the biggest hit Motown had ever had.
And consider what it cost Whitfield to get there: two years of fighting his own boss, three shelved versions, threats of firing — all for a song written on a broken piano with ten working keys. He was right every single time, and Motown is richer for his stubbornness. The grapevine, it turns out, was right too. You heard it first through Gladys.
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