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Soul Music
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Shop nowDivided Soul - Abridged
The Life of Marvin Gaye
Narrator
Dion Graham
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Length
6 hours 37 minutes
Language
English
In this intimate biography of the Prince of Soul, David Ritz provides a candid look at a star and a friend. Ritz had been collaborating with Marvin Gaye on his story for several years before the singer's tragic death and had conducted a series of extraordinary interviews in which Gaye discussed his deepest secrets. What emerges here is a full-scale portrait of a charming but tortured artist, a brilliant singer with a divided soul.
Here is Marvin's story, from his early years in the slums of Washington, DC, to his rise to the top of the Motown industry, his fall from grace, his comeback, and finally his sudden, shocking end at the hands of his own father. But it is also the story of his glorious music and the music of black America over the past fifty years, an epic tale whose cast of characters includes Diana Ross, Berry Gordie, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, and countless other icons from the world of soul music.
This is the definitive biography of an enormously gifted and sensitive musician.
David Ritz has collaborated with everyone from Ray Charles to Aretha Franklin.
Dion Graham, from HBO's The Wire, also narrates The First 48 on A&E. A multiple Audie Award-winning narrator and critically acclaimed actor, he has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. His performances have been praised as thoughtful and compelling, vivid, and full of life.
Reviews
“A biography as dramatic as any to come out of the pop field…told with sympathy and unflinching candor.”
“[David Ritz] tells Marvin Gaye’s sorrowful story with remarkable insight and sensitivity…Divided Soul is often startlingly candid, but it manages to avoid lurid sensationalism, no mean feat given the particulars of the story: sex, drugs, child abuse, show business scandal.”
“You won’t find a more fascinating rock bio.”
“One of the most widely acclaimed pop music biographies finally gets the audio treatment. As coauthor of one of Gaye’s biggest hits, ‘Sexual Healing,’ David Ritz actually knew Marvin Gaye, and their relationship gives this narrative a degree of intimacy rare in biographies…At the root of it was the artist’s complex relationship with his father, a contradiction that Dion Graham narrates expertly, mimicking the dialects of Marvin and his father. Graham is at ease with the colloquialisms that abound in this rough-and-tumble story of the rhythm-and-blues business and the performer who was at the center of it all until his father tragically took his life.”
“Dion Graham channels Marvin Gaye in his riveting performance of Ritz’s 1985 biography of the singer.”
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