‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’: Did Marvin Gaye inspire Stevie Wonder’s hit song?
Two Motown stars, both alike in dignity, the careers of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder are forever tied to each other. The levels of mutual respect between the two soul stars is evident throughout their respective musical output. Wonder, in particular, never passed up an opportunity to pay homage to his musical heroes, with Gaye believing the seminal track ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ to have been inspired by his own records.
As a child prodigy, Stevie Wonder was assigned Marvin Gaye as a mentor during his early days on the Motown label. In that sense, Wonder owes a great deal to the ‘Prince of Soul’ for setting him on a path to greatness, as Wonder himself has testified, “Marvin was the person who encouraged me that the music I had within me, I must feel free to let come out.” Such was his appreciation for his old mentor that Wonder performed ‘Lighting Up The Candles’ at Gaye’s funeral in 1984.
It was Gaye’s genre-defining masterpiece What’s Going On that saw the soul star move from standard pop love songs to exploring deeper social themes, with heavy overtones of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
Although the record proved unpopular with Motown boss Berry Gordy, who was more concerned with producing middle-of-the-road, radio-friendly pop tracks, the album cemented Marvin Gaye not just as an incredible musician but as one of the leading artistic figures within the civil rights movement.
The final track on the first side of What’s Going On, ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’, sees Gaye discuss an appreciation for the Earth and the need for humanity to take care of their surroundings. Revealing his inspiration for the track in a 1976 interview with Sounds, the soul singer revealed, “I would love to quit show business and go after that knowledge and that power that the truly gifted sorcerer has. The power’s here, it’s in the rocks, it’s in the air, it’s in the animals.”
Gaye revealed the connections between ‘Mercy Mercy Me’ and Stevie Wonder’s 1973 number-one single ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, saying: “We appear to have reached the bottom line. And, just like Bunny [Wailer] says, it’s in obeying the laws of nature that this wisdom and freedom lies. Those songs aren’t written for nothing. A lot of the time, they don’t even know it as writers, but they’re just forced to put Mother Nature into the picture, like in ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life.'”
Wonder’s track is, on a surface level, a fairly standard love ballad. On a deeper level, however, ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ is an ode to Mother Nature and the natural world, as Marvin Gaye claims. The pastoral themes are perhaps more overt in ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, but the reasons why Gaye might draw parallels between the two are obvious. Both figures were titans of the Motown scene, working very closely with each other and sharing an unparalleled level of mutual affection; the idea that the seminal release could not have influenced Stevie Wonder’s What’s Going On is unfathomable.
