When music critic Dave Marsh published his book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made in 1989, he declared "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" the greatest single of them all - and as the years go by, the selection seems more and more unassailable. Marvin Gaye's searing account of a man devastated to learn through the rumor mill of his lover's infidelity "distills four hundred years of paranoia and talking drum gossip into three minutes and fifteen seconds of anguished soul-searching," Marsh writes. "The proof's as readily accessible as your next unexpected encounter on the radio with the fretful, self-absorbed vocal that makes the record a lost continent of music and emotion."
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