On This Day in 1984, Soul Legend Marvin Gaye Was Gunned Down by His Father
On this day (April 1) in 1984, legendary soul singer Marvin Gaye was murdered by his father, Marvin Gaye Sr.
The elder Gaye shot his son twice after a heated argument the day before the singer’s 45th birthday. As a result, their relationship was antagonistic. Grief, depression, and pressure to continue creating hit songs led to substance abuse and substantial financial issues. At the same time, the soul legend was very close to his mother. Then, he went to his room and sat on his bed.
Moments later, Gaye’s father opened his bedroom door holding a .38 revolver.
Marvin Gay, Sr., (the “e” was added by his son for his stage name) was a preacher in the Hebrew Pentecostal Church and a proponent of a strict moral code he enforced brutally with his four children. Gaye told his father, “You can’t talk to my mother like that,” before his father turned the verbal altercation into a physical one.
The singer punched his father in the face several times. But as the critic Michael Eric Dyson put it, the man who “chased away the demons of millions…with his heavenly sound and divine art” was chased by demons of his own throughout his life.
If the physical cause of Marvin Gaye’s death was straightforward—”gunshot wound to chest perforating heart, lung and liver,” according to the Los Angeles County Coroner—the events that led to it were much more tangled.
By some reports, Marvin Sr. harbored significant envy over his son’s tremendous success, and Marvin Jr. clearly harbored unresolved feelings toward his abusive father.
Those feelings spilled out for the final time in the Los Angeles home of Marvin Gay, Sr., and his wife Alberta. He acted like someone who had finally gotten something out of the way,” she recalled of the moments after posting Gaye’s bail in David Ritz’ Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye.
Gaye was given a six-year suspended sentence and five years probation for a charge of voluntary manslaughter on September 20, 1984.
On the afternoon of April 1, 1984, Gaye’s parents were engaged in a heated argument, and the singer intervened.
According to Trouble Man, the biography of Gaye penned by Steve Turner, things escalated quickly. Hits like “Ain’t That Peculiar,” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and “Let’s Get It On” made him a superstar and afforded him a glamorous lifestyle.
On the one hand, there was the longstanding conflict with his father dating back to childhood. “He started speaking to me, but said nothing about Marvin. He was also, by all accounts, a hard-drinking cross-dresser who personally embodied a rather complicated model of morality. The tragedy marked the end of the “What’s Going On” singer’s life and his long and dysfunctional relationship with his father.
Called the Prince of Soul, Gaye helped shape the Motown Sound in the ’60s and ’70s.
Gaye was known as "the Prince of Motown," the soulful voice behind hits as wide-ranging as “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Like his label-mate Stevie Wonder, Gaye both epitomized and outgrew the crowd-pleasing sound that made Motown famous.
Over the course of his roughly 25-year recording career, he moved successfully from upbeat pop to “message” music to satin-sheet soul, combining elements of Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan and Barry White into one complicated and sometimes contradictory package.
The first bullet pierced the Prince of Soul’s heart, lung, liver, stomach, and left kidney, killing him almost instantly. Their adversarial relationship came to a head 41 years ago today.
The Murder of Marvin Gaye
Marvin Gaye’s close relationship with his mother and his father’s abrasive personality planted the seeds of his demise.