Song 244: Marking his first appearance on the playlist, this week's record Can I Get a Witness by Marvin Gaye, written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland, predated my awakening to rock and roll (and related genres like rhythm and blues) by a few months, and so I knew nothing about it the first time around. When I began filling out my collection of Rolling Stones LPs, at the turn of the '70s, I soon got acquainted with their cover of this song, and liked it quite a bit. As those next few years rolled along, I also began to learn a lot more about whole regions of the musical landscape that I had previously missed, including the '50s rockers, and also including a major portion of Motown recordings that I hadn't heard on my local hometown radio. Marvin Gaye was really hitting his stride in the early '70s, both artistically and commercially, making some really fine records and then selling a whole lot of them, so it seemed like a good time to catch up on his back catalog as well, and when I heard his original hit version of this song, I liked it even better than the Rolling Stones cover. Sadly, in 1984, Marvin's own father shot and killed him the day before he would have turned 45, and while I've read the story about why the older man did that, still, decades later, the shooting makes no sense to me -- somehow, somewhere, it just seems like it wasn't fair. Can I get a witness? On a side note, I crafted this piece today as a companion to my political blog entry entitled Witness to Injustice which appears on both Politics 106 and Daily Kos.
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