Marvin Gaye Discography

Marvin Gaye Discography

This is a listing of all of the singles and albums released by the American musician, Marvin Gaye. Starting his career as member of the doo-wop group, the Marquees, at 18, Gaye recorded two songs as a member of the group produced by Bo Diddley before Diddley reassigned the act to be mentored by Harvey Fuqua, who changed their name to Harvey and the New Moonglows, after Fuqua's fifties group, the Moonglows, recording four songs with them, including Gaye's first lead vocal, "Mama Loochie", in 1959. After leaving the group in 1960, he worked for Fuqua in the record labels, Anna, Harvey and Tri-Phi, before he signed with Motown Records at the end of the year following a performance at Motown founder Berry Gordy's house. Gaye recorded and released his first solo songs in 1961 on the Tamla subsidiary of Motown and also released his first album, The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye that same year. Gaye's first three singles failed to chart nationally and his album failed to enter the charts.

Gaye started finding success in late 1962 with the song, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow", which would be the first of 60 R&B top-forty singles Gaye would record over two decades. Gaye entered the top-40 of the Billboard Hot 100 the following year with the songs, "Hitch Hike", "Pride & Joy" and "Can I Get a Witness". In 1964, he scored his first two charted albums, first with the Mary Wells duet project, Together, and then with the compilation, Marvin Gaye's Greatest Hits. A year later, he scored his first million-selling singles with "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)", "I'll Be Doggone" and "Ain't That Peculiar". After scoring another hit duet, "It Takes Two" with Kim Weston, Gaye found his biggest duet success with Tammi Terrell in 1967 with songs such as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", "Your Precious Love", "You're All I Need to Get By" and "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing". These successes were followed up a year later, in 1968 with "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", which became the final number-one single in 1968 and the first number-one single in 1969, spending seven total weeks at the top. Gaye scored two more top-ten hits in 1969 with "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" and "That's the Way Love Is" before going into a seclusion after Gaye's duet partner Tammi Terrell succumbed from a brain tumor in 1970.

Gaye returned to the top with What's Going On in 1971, with three of its singles - "What's Going On", "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" and "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)", reaching the top-ten of the pop charts and peaking at number-one on the R&B charts. After some mild success in 1972 with the song "You're the Man" and the soundtrack to the crime thriller, Trouble Man, Gaye reached the top of the charts in 1973 with "Let's Get It On" and its parent album, which spent five weeks at number-two on the Billboard 200. Gaye's final number-one pop single was the disco-leaning funk song, "Got to Give It Up", in 1977, which also topped the R&B and dance charts. The album that featured the song, Live at the London Palladium, sold over two million copies, becoming one of the top-ten best-selling albums of the year. After a self-imposed European tax exile in the early 1980s, Gaye returned in 1982 with "Sexual Healing", which peaked at number three on the pop chart and stayed at number-one on the R&B chart for ten weeks. The album, Midnight Love, would later become his best-selling album, selling over three million copies in the United States alone.

In total, Gaye reached the Billboard charts a total 67 times, including 41 songs that reached the top-forty on the Billboard Hot 100, eighteen reaching the top-ten and three reaching number-one, with 60 of those songs reaching the top 40 of the R&B charts, 38 reaching the top 10 and thirteen reaching number-one. Six albums reached the top-ten of the Billboard 200 and eighteen reached the top-ten on the R&B chart with a total of seven albums reaching number-one. Gaye also had major success in the UK, and modest success in several other European countries.