The personal anguish underlying Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," perhaps the greatest song in Motown history, is starkly evident in the recording's haunting isolated vocal track (SLYT).

In a two part podcast series, scholar Andrew Hickey traces the convoluted history of a song that the label never thought would be a hit, and the lives of the many performers that shaped it. The episodes are part of Hickey's monumental History of Rock Music in 500 Songs series (recently and maddeningly on the blue here, and previously and previously).

As previously mentioned, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is an exhaustive exploration of that music genre, starting before it existed and currently up to 1966. It is notable for the extensive research that goes into each episode (the detailed exploration of where Johnny Cash drew inspiration from is particularly striking), so much so that another podcaster (not linked to here for obvious reasons) has apparently been plagiarising entire episodes.