Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was at one time the best-selling single in Motown Records history — and then Marvin Gaye’s version of the song came along just 13 months later, and knocked it off its pedestal. But Knight’s “Grapevine” is no footnote: her rendition of the Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong classic continues to gain admirers more than half a century after its original release, buoyed by an incendiary 1969 live performance featured in Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul.
Knight and the Pips were already established hit-makers when they signed to Motown in early 1966. Knight was born and raised in Atlanta, honing her extraordinary vocal talent in her church choir, and when she was all of eight years old, her powerhouse performance of the Nat King Cole hit “Too Young” claimed the $2,000 top prize on the July 1, 1952 installment of NBC television’s long-running talent competition The Original Amateur Hour, a precursor to programs like Star Search and American Idol. Knight and brother Merald (a.k.a. “Bubba”), sister Brenda and their cousins Eleanor and William Guest formed the first incarnation of the Pips later that same year after performing an impromptu set during Bubba’s tenth birthday party; another cousin, James “Pip” Woods, inspired the vocal quintet’s name.
The Pips swiftly emerged as a dominant force on the Atlanta talent show circuit, and as their local notoriety grew, Brunswick Records extended a contract offer, releasing the group’s debut single ”Ching Chong” in 1958. Despite live dates in support of soul superstars including Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, the single went nowhere, and Brunswick dropped the Pips in early 1959. Both Brenda Knight and Eleanor Guest soon exited the lineup to start families, and were replaced by still another cousin, Edward Patten, alongside friend Langston George.
The Pips resurfaced in 1961 with the Johnny Otis-penned “Every Beat of My Heart.” Atlanta label Huntom Records had already inked a national distribution deal with Vee-Jay Records when the Pips traveled to New York City to audition for Bobby Robinson’s Fury Records; when Robinson learned that Vee-Jay was cutting the group out of its share of the “Every Beat of My Heart” profits, he insisted they re-record the song for Fury, and although both versions reached the Billboard Hot 100, the Vee-Jay release fared far better, climbing to number six on the pop charts and becoming the first of 11 Pips singles to top the R&B charts.
Beginning with the Fury release of “Every Beat of My Heart,” the group billed itself as Gladys Knight and the Pips, and under that name issued its second Fury effort “Letter Full of Tears” in late 1961. The single was written by Don Covay, author of Chubby Checker’s smash “Pony Time,” and arranged by Horace Ott — “the first time we had ever used a string section,” Bubba Knight told historian Bill Dahl for 2001’s Motown: The Golden Years. “There was a guy that had just jumped on Bobby Robinson’s promotional team by the name of Marshall Sehorn [later the longtime business partner of writer and producer Allen Toussaint]. Bobby really didn’t want to record strings, and Marshall Sehorn begged him to put strings on this song for us. Because during that time, when you used strings, it kind of made yourself a little more sophisticated than the regular R&B thing.” Sehorn’s instincts were correct: “Letter Full of Tears” peaked at number 19 on the Hot 100.
Knight and the Pips’ third and final Fury single “Operator” stumbled, however, and soon after Langston George resigned, reducing the lineup to a four-piece. The birth of Gladys Knight’s first child in August 1962 further eroded the act’s momentum, and apart from a handful of live performances, the Pips essentially disappeared from sight until signing to New York-based Maxx Records in 1964, finally returning to the charts with their third single for the label, the Van McCoy-penned “Giving Up,” which soared to number six on the Billboard R&B singles chart and reached number 38 on the Hot 100.
Heading into 1965, Knight and the Pips were at a crossroads. While their stage act was considered one of the best in the business (thanks in part to their long collaboration with legendary choreographer and vaudeville veteran Cholly “Pops” Atkins), the group felt it could not reach the upper reaches of stardom without stronger material and savvier promotion, so the three male Pips reached out to an old friend, Maurice King, about joining the Motown roster.
King was already a legend in Detroit music circles even before he entered the Motown ranks. The Mississippi Delta native studied music at Tennessee A&I State College (now Tennessee State University) and served as the assistant music director for the school band, behind famed trumpeter and arranger Sammy Lowe (on leave from the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra). King settled in Detroit in 1949 after spending much of the decade as the musical director for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female jazz band. He initially befriended Knight and the Pips when they played the iconic Flame Show Bar, postwar Detroit’s premier venue for Black entertainment, where King led the house band, the Wolverines; he also struck up a friendship with an aspiring local songwriter named Berry Gordy Jr., whose sister Gwen owned the Flame’s photo concession, and in 1963, Gordy asked King to join Motown and serve as a performance coach and mentor for fledgling acts including the Supremes, the Temptations and Marvin Gaye.
“I was the musical director of artist development,” King told the Detroit Metro-Times in 1986. “I taught [the vocal groups] how to phrase. I arranged their music; I arranged songs for them. I taught them how to blend.”
Motown extended a contract offer to Knight and the Pips in early 1966, soon after Gordy traveled to New York to see the group perform at Harlem’s renowned Apollo Theatre. “They were everything Motown was telling its acts they had to be when they came onboard,” writes Nelson George in his classic Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound. “Their choreography was precise, exciting, and always timed to highlight the lyric. Onstage, the three male Pips were elegant, sepia Fred Astaires whose sweat never obscured their style. Gladys was the gospel counterpoint, moving left as the guys moved right, her Southern charm flowing sweetly from the stage.”
Gladys Knight was firmly opposed to signing the deal, however. “I had a lot of doubt about what Motown could do for us,” she later explained. “I thought we would have to come after the stars who were already there. When we were approached by Motown with a contract, we took a vote on whether we should accept. The guys voted to sign. I voted no. I was outvoted.”
Motown assigned Knight and the Pips to its Soul imprint, which featured artists working in a more traditional R&B style. Their Soul debut, “Just Walk in My Shoes,” was exactly the kind of misguided disappointment Knight feared: while the single was a Top 40 hit in Britain, it climbed no higher than number 129 on the Billboard pop 100, and didn’t even chart on R&B radio. Even worse, producers Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol decided to bring in the Andantes, Motown’s in-house backing vocalists, to sing over the Pips’ signature harmonies. Motown staff producer Norman Whitfield assumed the helm for the follow-up, “Take Me in Your Arms and Love Me,” which rose to number 13 in the U.K. and clawed its way to number 98 on the Hot 100, but once again missed the R&B singles chart.
Whitfield remained in the driver’s seat for Knight and the Pips’ third Motown release “Everybody Needs Love,” first recorded in 1964 by the Temptations; the single was the group’s first U.S. Top 40 hit in two years, reaching number 39 on the Hot 100 and peaking at number three R&B, but its success did little to assuage Knight’s concerns that she and the Pips were nothing more than afterthoughts within the Motown hierarchy. “Diana [Ross] and the Supremes, the Temptations and Marvin Gaye were given all the hits, while we took the leftovers,” she recalled in a 2018 episode of cable network A&E’s Biography.
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” did little to alter Knight’s perspective, at least initially. Smokey Robinson’s Miracles first cut the song in August 1966, although their rendition remained unreleased for two years. Whitfield next recorded the song with Marvin Gaye, assembling the completed track over a series of five Hitsville USA studio sessions spanning from Feb. 3 to April 10, 1967. Gaye’s rendition — the searing, sinuous account of a man devastated to learn through the rumor mill of his lover’s infidelity — was similarly rejected by Motown’s demanding quality control team, and languished in the Motown vaults for 18 months.
Whitfield tore down and rebuilt “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by the time he cut it with Knight and the Pips on June 17, 1967: drawing inspiration from Aretha Franklin’s mammoth Atlantic Records hit “Respect,” the producer rearranged the song to mimic the trademark funk sound of Alabama’s Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section studio session crew, an approach calibrated to showcase Knight’s fiery, gospel-inspired vocals.
“When [Whitfield] came to us with this particular song, it was like ‘Hey, I really believe in this song. Just take it and play with it,’” Knight told NPR’s Fresh Air in 1996. ”We created the whole background [vocal arrangement]… we would get up in the morning, fix our breakfast while we were playing it, tape what we had in mind, and eventually we felt we had it right. We ran it down to the studio, played it for Norman, and he just flipped.”
Berry Gordy was considerably less enchanted with the finished result, but after much deliberation, he finally gave Knight and the Pips’ “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” his official seal of approval, and the single appeared on Soul on Sept. 28, 1967. It went on to sell 2.5 million copies, topping Billboard’s R&B Singles chart and climbing to number two on the Hot 100, behind the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer.” The success of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” ensured Whitfield would continue to steer Knight and the Pips’ career, and under his command they returned to the Top 20 with singles like “The End of Our Road,” “The Nitty Gritty” and “Friendship Train.”
But Whitfield continued to badger Gordy to release Marvin Gaye’s recording of “Grapevine,” emphasizing the differences in its cinematic arrangement; Gordy was reluctant to release another version as a single so soon after Knight and the Pips topped the charts, however, so Gaye’s recording was discreetly tucked away on his 1968 LP In the Groove. E Rodney Jones, a DJ at Chicago’s Black community radio station WVON, grokked its potential and played it on the air, telling Motown marketing executive Phil Jones that “the phones lit up” in response. Stations across the U.S. soon added “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” to their playlists, and finally Motown bowed to public sentiment, officially releasing the song as a single on Oct. 30, 1968. In the final tally, Gaye’s rendition outsold Knight’s by about 1.5 million copies, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks on its way to becoming Motown’s most commercially successful single to date — a title usurped in mid-1970 by the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There.”
Knight and the Pips nevertheless entered the new decade on a roll, reaching number three on Billboard’s R&B singles chart with “You Need Love Like I Do (Don’t You).” Their second and final single of 1970, “If I Were Your Woman” — produced by Clay McMurray, who co-wrote the song with Pam Sawyer and Gloria Jones — topped the R&B chart and hit number nine on the Hot 100.
Knight and the Pips remained fixtures of the Top 40 for the next two years, a run culminating in the release of Jim Weatherly’s poignant ballad “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye),” which like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” went number one on the R&B chart but could climb no higher than number two on the Hot 100, behind Vicki Lawrence’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.”
“Neither One of Us” was the last single Knight and the Pips recorded for Motown before jumping ship for Buddah Records, whose president Art Kass promised its members they would no longer be cogs in a machine. Their second Buddah single, Weatherly’s “Midnight Train to Georgia,” remains one of the most sublime records of its decade or any other: this time, Knight and the Pips finally topped both the pop and R&B charts, and went on to clean up at the 1974 Grammy Awards, claiming the prize for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group for “Midnight Train to Georgia” while winning Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group for “Neither One of Us.”
Gladys Knight and the Pips split following 1987’s All Our Love; nine years later, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and subsequently earned enshrinement in the Vocal Group Hall of Fame and the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame. Despite their enduring success, their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” faded from the popular consciousness over time as Marvin Gaye’s rendition became the de facto standard on oldies radio playlists, particularly in the wake of its prominent appearance in filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 tragicomic hit The Big Chill, which plundered the Motown catalog to soundtrack the ennui of its baby-boomer protagonists.
But in 2021, Questlove — the acclaimed drummer for hip-hop mainstays the Roots — released his directorial debut Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), a documentary feature surveying the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which took place on six Sundays between June 29 and August 24 at Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). Knight and the Pips’ Harlem Cultural Festival performance of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” towers among Summer of Soul’s most electrifying moments, exposing multiple generations of viewers to a forgotten Motown classic they might not otherwise have known existed.
“[‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’] wasn’t just a record for us,” Knight wrote in her 1997 autobiography Between Each Line of Pain and Glory. “It was a work permit, and work came flowing our way.”
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