Listening for Tammi: Vocal Identity in the Duets of Gaye and Terrell

• In Event: Musical Movements and Sonic Identities

Abstract

During a brief period during the late 1960s, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell worked together as one of the most successful and popular Black duet teams in the music industry. Their singles “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Precious Love” and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” were chart toppers in 1967 and 1968. In a 1985 biography of Gaye, David Ritz quoted the singer describing an arrangement in which songwriter and producer Valerie Simpson performed a number of vocal parts under the guise of Terrell, who was gravely ill at the time. There have long been similar rumors and reports suggesting that Terrell did not actually perform some of the vocals that we now commonly attribute to her.

This paper considers primary-source audio and paper evidence from the Motown archives to further investigate the identity of the vocalists performing on the Gaye and Terrell duets. Using multi-track tape audio, track inventories and the Motown session logs, it is possible to gain a good sense of Terrell’s actual involvement in the sessions bearing her name. In addition, live performance advertisements and reviews, evidence about Terrell’s ongoing health issues and the memories of many who were there help to create a clearer picture of the production processes and vocal identities behind many of the three-dozen-or-so tracks attributed to Gaye and Terrell.

The Gaye and Terrell duets are still present in many ways in the sonic landscape of modern culture. Detailed knowledge of these sessions informs a number of current topics of interest to scholars of musicology. In his recent book, Black Ephemera: The Crisis and the Challenge of the Musical Archive, Mark Anthony Neal writes about the ways in which a new, mostly digital archive is helping scholars to pose new questions about histories of Black music. This paper reveals a similarly nuanced environment surrounding the creation of Terrell’s duet recordings, which traversed lines of creativity and business, both in both public and private realms. An objective interrogation of the facts leads to important critical questions about attribution, the creative process and gender roles in Black popular music of the late 1960s.

Biographical Information

Andrew Flory is Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, MN (USA). He has published widely on American popular music. He is a historical musicologist with a specialty in rock and R&B styles. He completed his Ph.D in 2006 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the direction of John Covach. Recent articles by Flory include “The Ballads of Marvin Gaye” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2019), “Liveness and the Grateful Dead” (American Music, 2019) and “The Expense of Exclusion: US Musicology and Popular Music” (Twentieth Century Music, 2021). Flory is the author of the book I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B (Michigan, 2017) and the co-author of the industry-leading history of rock textbook What’s that Sound (Norton, 2021). He also works as a consultant for Universal Music Enterprises, and has co-produced many Motown-oriented reissue recordings. He has written liner notes for The Complete Motown Singles collection and was co-producer of the 2012 CD Marvin Gaye, Trouble Man [Expanded Edition]. Flory has given lectures at many national and international scholarly societies and institutions like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Rockheim in Norway. He has also been invited to speak at more than a dozen different colleges and universities. He is currently writing a biography of Marvin Gaye.

Author

• Andrew Flory, Carleton College