Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
He Planned His Own Death - The Marvin Gaye story
02 Feb 2025
World famous R&B singer Marvin Gaye is shot and killed by his own father.
Full Episode
You know this famous singer Marvin Gaye? Well, one day Marvin gets into an argument with his dad and this argument gets heated, like really heated. And they're yelling at each other and they're screaming and then bam, it turns violent. And then suddenly his dad pulls out a pew-pew and he aims it and blam, he shoots Marvin in the chest, which is exactly what Marvin had planned. Let me explain.
Now, in order for this to all make sense, let's rewind back to when Marvin is eight years old. And now, he's just a kid here, but he actually has quite a terrible life. Now, his dad, who we'll just call dad, dad is a minister, and he drinks a lot, and he's also really violent and extremely strict.
Like, he'll often discipline little Marvin for things like wetting his bed, being a minute late home from school, or reciting Bible passages wrong. And when I say discipline, I mean... Yeah, dad's a real jerk. And little Marvin's not the only one dad is abusive to. He apparently gets violent with Marvin's mom too, who we'll just call mom.
And like dad will get physical with her and he also verbally abuses her and also sleeps around on her a lot. He sounds like a real winner. And throughout all this, apparently mom wants to leave him But unfortunately, she won't because she's religious and I guess divorces against their religion.
So anyway, mom and dad and Marvin and his siblings, they all just keep living in this extremely chaotic household. And to make it worse, little Marvin loves secular music, but dad discourages him from pursuing it, calling it the devil's music. But luckily, little Marvin just keeps on singing and playing as his mom is always there to encourage him. But then everything changes.
Time passes and little Marvin grows up and he actually becomes a professional singer-songwriter. And bro has a hell of a voice. And so he works hard and he tours and he writes a bunch of songs and soon enough his career blows up and everyone knows who he is. And he's out here selling albums and he's selling out tours and he's got songs on the radio. He actually has 41 songs make the top 40 charts.
41, including his most famous song, Let's Get It On, which is a song that I like to dedicate to your mother. My point is, despite being discouraged by his dad when he was young, Marvin ends up becoming the biggest soul singer in the world, and he ends up having an incredible career in music. Until... Fast forward a couple of decades to the early 80s, and Marvin is 44 years old now.
In his career, it's still doing well, like he's still out there playing and making hits. In fact, he's just released one of his biggest songs ever, Sexual Healing, and it just hit number one. So all that's doing really well. But unfortunately, the poor guy still has a problem. He's super depressed, like clinically depressed.
And he's been battling this depression for years, and it just doesn't seem to get any better. Not only that, he's suffering from a drug habit. Mostly what I like to call Coca-Cola. And this habit only adds to his depression problem. Not to mention the drug habit is also making him really paranoid, like really paranoid. He always believes he's being pursued by people who want to unalive him.
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