Can I Get A Witness

Gaye wrote many of his own hits, but "Can I Get A Witness" was written by the famous Motown team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland. The title is a phrase commonly used in black churches and has a very spiritual connotation: When the preacher asks, "Can I get a witness," he's asking the congregation for affirmation, often met with the response of "Amen!" This song helped popularize the phrase. All three members of the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team had a background in gospel music. Dozier explained to NME in 1984: "That was the thing a lot of black people played; a lot of gospel music and a lot of classical. When I was coming up, my aunt played piano and my grandma instructed her what to sing in church since she was one of the church's directors. My aunt played different classical music and I remember sitting on the stool and she would serenade me with these tunes and they sort of stuck with me, influenced me throughout the years. The gospel music on the other hand influenced myself and the Holland brothers because it was the thing you had to do every Sunday – go to church. Black gospel music was part of the lifestyle."

They're barely audible, but The Supremes added background vocals on this track along with the song's writers, Holland-Dozier-Holland. The call-and-response style mimicked a church congregation shouting back to the preacher. The Supremes had a lot of support from Motown head Berry Gordy, but no hits to show for it when this song was recorded in September 1963. Holland-Dozier-Holland had some success with songs like "(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave" and "You Lost the Sweetest Boy," but no #1s. That changed in 1964 when H-D-H wrote "Where Did Our Love Go," and The Supremes very reluctantly recorded it. The songwriting trio ended up writing nine more chart-toppers for the group, which became the biggest female act on Motown. In 1973, Diana Ross – by then the "first lady of Motown" – and Marvin Gaye released the duets album called Diana & Marvin.

The Holland-Dozier-Holland team also wrote Gaye's hit "How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You." With Gaye, they wrote songs in keys that were higher than he was comfortable singing, which got him into his falsetto. "We would stretch it a key higher, or even half a key higher, so it was out of his comfort zone and when he sang it, he could develop his own style and make the song his," Lamont Dozier told Songfacts.