The West Adams Bullet

April 1, 1984, the Gramercy Place house in West Adams, Los Angeles. Marvin Pentz Gay Jr., forty-four, the singer of I Heard It Through the Grapevine and What's Going On and Sexual Healing, is shot twice by his father Marvin Gay Sr. with the .38-caliber revolver Marvin Jr. has given him the previous Christmas for self-defense. The first bullet enters the right side of his chest and stops the heart. The second is fired at point-blank range into the prone body. He dies at California Hospital Medical Center one hour later, one day short of his forty-fifth birthday. The senior Gay is convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to six years probation.

Tariah Robinson's biography opens earlier — in Washington, D.C., where Marvin was born in 1939 to a Pentecostal-minister father and a domestic-worker mother — and follows the arc through the Detroit move and the Anna Gordy marriage of 1963, the long Motown years and the Tammi Terrell duets of 1967-70, the 1971 What's Going On that Berry Gordy initially refused to release, the long tax-trouble Ostend exile of 1981-82, the Sexual Healing comeback and the Grammy of 1983, the cocaine-fuelled return to Los Angeles in late 1983, and the morning of April 1, 1984.

What emerges is a portrait of the Motown singer whose three decades of work remade what American Black popular music could say — and the patricide on a West Adams floor that the family had been writing since the Pentecostal house in Washington.