Marvin Gaye was no longer just a Motown act. He was an artist.
—
The success of *What’s Going On* gave Gaye something he had always wanted: creative control. It also gave him leverage with Berry Gordy, and in 1971 he signed a new deal with Motown reportedly worth approximately $1 million—described at the time as one of the largest contracts given to a Black recording artist.
His next project was a film score. *Trouble Man* (1972) was a blaxploitation film, and Gaye wrote and recorded the complete soundtrack. The title song reached No. 7 on the Hot 100 in early 1973.
But the album that would define the next phase of his career was still ahead—and it would arrive through a meeting with a 17-year-old girl named Janis Hunter.
—
PART SIX: LET’S GET IT ON—AND THE WOMEN WHO SHAPED HIM
In 1973, while working on what would become his landmark album *Let’s Get It On*, Marvin Gaye met Janis Hunter.
She was 17. He was 33.
Janis Hunter was born January 5, 1956. She was the daughter of singer Frankie Hunter and a woman named Barbara Jean Hunter. She was young, beautiful, and immediately compelling to Gaye. He brought her into the recording sessions. He wrote some of the album’s most explicitly romantic material in the orbit of his feelings for her.
*Let’s Get It On* was released in August 1973. The title track became Gaye’s second No. 1 single on the Hot 100—his first had been “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” in 1968. The album was a declaration of sensuality, of a man making explicit what Black male sexuality had always been forced to code or soften for crossover consumption. Gaye refused to soften it.