#1: Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell
City: Grande Prairie, AB
Radio Station: CFGP
Peak Month: July 1967
Peak Position in Grande Prairie #2
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #14
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #19
YouTube: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”
Lyrics: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”
Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. was born in 1939 in Washington D.C. His father was a Pentecostal church minister who never held down a job for more than three years in a row. Marvin’s childhood consisted of “brutal whippings”, since Gay Sr. would strike him for any shortcoming, including putting his hairbrush in the wrong place or coming home from school a minute late. Marvin later stated, “It wasn’t simply that my father beat me, though that was bad enough. By the time I was twelve, there wasn’t an inch on my body that hadn’t been bruised and beaten by him.” He also said that “living with Father was like living with a king, an all-cruel, changeable, cruel and all-powerful king”. He later recalled, “if it wasn’t for Mother, who was always there to console me and praise me for my singing, I think I would have been one of those child suicides you read about in the papers.”
