He was not consistently a candid interviewee. He was charming and evasive by turns. He said things in interviews that contradicted things he had said before, or that contradicted what those closest to him reported. He was not a reliable narrator of his own life.
But in the music—in the aggregate of what he recorded between 1961 and 1983—there is something that functions as testimony in a way that ordinary biographical disclosure rarely achieves.
*What’s Going On* testifies to a man who could hold the pain of an entire society in his voice without losing his tenderness toward it. *Here, My Dear* testifies to a man who could not stop loving someone even when the love was destroying him. *Let’s Get It On* testifies to a man who was not interested in apologizing for his desire. “Sexual Healing” testifies to a man who had known what it was to be broken and had found, however briefly, something that felt like repair.
Even “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”—the straightforward jealousy record, the Motown hit—testifies to something: a voice that could make the anxiety of being betrayed feel like a physical sensation in the listener’s chest.
This is what he was. This is what he did.
And when we listen to these recordings now—more than forty years after his death—we are doing something that is, in its own quiet way, an act of testimony too. We are saying that this mattered. That we heard it. That we are still hearing it.