Berry Gordy Jr. on the passing of his sister Anna Gordy Gaye
By Brian McCollum
Detroit Free Press Pop Music Writer
“My sister Anna was the glamour girl of the family. She was beautiful, sexy, playful, lovely. Men loved her but she lived for her family, especially her younger brothers of which I was lucky enough to be one.
“She backed me up on everything I tried to do and gave me the confidence to be what I wanted to be.
“She gave me all the love that a sister could give a brother.
“When I first came to California as a teenage boxer, Anna lived there and I knew I would have a place to call home.
“I will miss her so dearly. What I’m grateful for most was that she lived to see me reach my goals and shared them all with me in happiness and joy.”
“She backed me up on everything I tried to do and gave me the confidence to be what I wanted to be.
“She gave me all the love that a sister could give a brother.
“When I first came to California as a teenage boxer, Anna lived there and I knew I would have a place to call home.
“I will miss her so dearly. What I’m grateful for most was that she lived to see me reach my goals and shared them all with me in happiness and joy.”
Anna Gordy Gaye, a crucial force in Motown’s rise and an ex-wife of Marvin Gaye, died early this morning, a Motown representative confirmed. She was 92.
Gaye “transitioned early this morning surrounded by her loving son Marvin Gaye III and other family members,” read a statement from Universal Music.
The Georgia-born Anna Gordy was the third-oldest of the eight children in Detroit’s entrepreneurial Gordy family, and following the 2011 death of Esther Gordy Edwards, was the only remaining sister. She is survived by younger brothers Berry Gordy Jr., 84, and Robert Gordy, 82.
TMZ reported that she died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles.
Funeral arrangements have not been announced.
Her name was emblazoned on some of Berry Gordy’s earliest record productions via the Anna Records label, which she founded in 1958 with sister Gwen Gordy. The label was formally absorbed into Berry Gordy’s Motown Records in 1961, several months after notching its biggest national hit, “Money (That’s What I Want)” by Barrett Strong.
In 1963, at age 41, she wed 24-year-old Marvin Gaye after more than a year of dating. She famously served as the inspiration for the singer’s first top-10 pop hit, 1963’s “Pride and Joy.”
Mickey Stevenson, the song’s cowriter and head of Motown’s A&R department, said Anna Gordy Gaye became an important liaison between the mercurial singer and the Motown operation.
“She helped me with Marvin a lot,” he said today. “Whenever he was missing out there someplace, she’d say: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find him for you. I’ll get him there.’ She saved me a lot of trouble.”
Anna Gordy Gaye — “tall, gorgeous and fine,” in Stevenson’s words — was a picture of “style and class, and she brought a strong personality that the young female artists picked up on quickly,” he said. “It was her walk, her smile, her talk.”
She occasionally contributed to Marvin Gaye’s songwriting, including a pair of compositions on his career-defining 1971 album, “What’s Going On.”
They had one son, Marvin Gaye III, born in 1966. The family moved to Los Angeles amid Motown’s migration west in the early 1970s.
The Gaye marriage was often tempestuous, the couple’s fights chronicled in later years by biographers. They divorced in 1976, and the split fueled Marvin Gaye’s subsequent album, “Here, My Dear,” including the track “Anna’s Song.”
“I found myself in the studio crying in the microphone,” he told the Free Press several years later.
The two reconciled before Marvin Gaye’s 1984 death, and Anna was a guest of her ex-husband at the Grammy Awards in 1983.
Contact Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 orbmccollum@freepress.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment