But that was almost certainly part of it.
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“Stubborn Kind of Fellow” arrived in September 1962 and changed everything.
The song reached No. 8 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 46 on the Hot 100. It was his first significant hit—not a runaway success, but enough to establish that Marvin Gaye had something that the listening public wanted.
The hits followed in rapid succession. “Hitch Hike” in early 1963 became his first pop top 40 entry. “Pride and Joy,” released in July 1963, became his first Hot 100 top ten, climbing to No. 10. Gaye was on his way.
But something else happened in 1963 that would define his life at Motown in ways no hit single could. On June 8, 1963, in Detroit, Marvin Gaye married Anna Gordy.
Anna Gordy was the sister of Berry Gordy Jr. She was 37 years old at the time of their marriage; Marvin was 24. They had met around 1960, when Gaye was working as a session drummer for Anna Records, a label that Anna helped run. Their courtship lasted approximately two years.
The marriage was many things simultaneously: a genuine love affair, an alliance of ambition, and a structural knot that bound Marvin Gaye to the Gordy family in ways that would prove extremely difficult to unravel.
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Through the mid-1960s, Gaye became Motown’s top solo male artist. Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting and production team who would become the architects of the Motown Sound, wrote “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)” for him; the song reached No. 6 in January 1965. Smokey Robinson wrote “Ain’t That Peculiar” and “I’ll Be Doggone,” which became Gaye’s first No. 1 hits on the R&B chart.