Much of the significant truth about the career of the Afro-American singer Marvin Gaye may be obscured by the problems of his later life and the manner of his dying (he was shot to death by his father April 1, 1984, in a tragic, and as yet unexplained, incident).

First and foremost, Gaye was a Christian artist. He was also one of the most gifted performers produced by the Afro-American religious experience. Raised in his father's Pentecostal church, located in the East Capitol projects in Washington, D.C., Gaye was imbued with a deep spiritual sensitivity anchored in a Christ-centered ethic of love. Initially this sensitivity was expressed in his instrumental virtuosity -- especially on the organ, piano, and drums. Althought Gaye sang in the church choir, his vocal talent did not surface until he filled the first-tenor slot of Harvey Fuqua's Moonglows, a smooth-harmony rhythm and blues group. When Gaye's silky and soulful voice caught the attention of Berry Gordy, Jr. -- the founder of Motown Recording Company -- in a Detroit nightclub in 1961, he was immediately offered a contract. The public career of Marvin Gaye had begun.

Motown was the Jackie Robinson of black popular music: after crossing the color line it its field, it went on to excel and to win the hearts of vast numbers of nonblack Americans. As with other Motown stars -- Diana Ross, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson -- Gaye's relationship with Motown enabled his talent to become visible to the world. Unlike those other artists, Gaye's musical and philosophical roots remained in the Afro-American Christian tradition. His first classic recordings were neither adolescent, rhythmic dance records (as with the Supremes and the Jackson Five) nor funky rock renderings (as with Lionel Richie's Commodores). Rather, Gaye's great early achievements -- sung with the incomparable Tammi Terrell -- were poignant and powerful love songs, written by the team of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson of White Rock Baptist Church in New York City. These classics -- such as "Your Precious Love," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing," "You're All I Need to Get By" and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" -- were the pivotal songs that directed the Christian relgiosity of black church music into the secular spirituality of Afro-American popular music. For the first time in American history, the musical depth of the black church was let loose into the mainstream of American society. And American popular music would never again be the same.

Upon the tragic death of Tammi Terrell, who collapsed in Gaye's arms during a performance in 1967, Gaye went into hiding. Despite his success as a solo performer ("I'll Be Doggone," "Ain't That Peculiar," and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" all reached the Top Ten), Gaye became reclusive, melancholic and deeply dissatisfied with his music. He would not perform publicly for five years.

"WHAT'S GOING ON"

Yet Gaye's tortuous struggle with the sudden death of Tammi Terrell, his younger brother Frankie's firsthand accounts of atrocities in Vietnam, the escalation of the civil rights movement into black power advocacy, the widespread invasion of drugs among unemployed black youth and the rise of ecological consciousness produced the greatest album in Afro-American popular music: What's Going On (1971). This groundbreaking album was not only the first conceived and enacted by the artist (as opposed to studio staffers), but also the first concept album that hung together by means of a set of themes -- themes concerned with socio-economic critique and Christian outlook.

Gaye's critique of American society was explicit. "Rockets, moon shots," he wrote in "Inner City Blues," "Spend it on the have-nots." With "radiation underground and in the sky," he saw birds and animals dying in "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)." Instead of brutality, he asked attention: "Talk to me, so you can see" ("What's Going On"). And in such songs as "Save the Children," "God Is Love" and "Wholly Holy," he explicitly evoked the love ethic of Jesus Christ as the basis for negating and transforming the world: If we learn from the book jesus left us, we can rock the world, we can "holler love across the nation."

What's Going On was the peak of Gaye's career. He continued to produce popular albums and hits. Yet, principally owing to two painful divorces, Oedipal obsessions, paranoiac fits and suicidal impulses, Gaye became captive to a form of bondage he admonished others to avoid: drugs. His songs still portrayed a longing for transcendence, but instead of the agapic praxis of communities he highlighted erotic communion -- as in his albums Let's Get It On (1973) and I Want You and his Grammy Award single "Sexual Healing" (1982).

In his last years, Gaye oscillated between earthly pessimism and eschatological hope: from the notion that nuclear holocaust was imminent to a faith that only Jesus can save us. During his sporadic bouts with suicide, Gaye is reported to have viewed Jesus and sins that would never be forgiven as the primary motivations to live. And, at the height of this turmoil, the last words he wrote for his laste album, Midnight Love (1982), were "I still love Jesus, all praises to the Heavenly Father." May this troubled musical genius, deeply immersed in the Afro-American religious experience and genuinely sensitive to the harsh realities of American society, rest in peace. And may his artistic Christian witness live forever.