Marvin Gaye - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. better known by his stage name Marvin Gaye, was an American singer-songwriter and musician with a three-octave vocal range

Vocal range

Vocal range is the measure of the breadth of pitches that a human voice can phonate. Although the study of vocal range has little practical application in terms of speech, it is a topic of study within linguistics, phonetics, and speech and language pathology, particularly in relation to the study...

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Starting his career as a member of the doo-wop

Doo-wop

The name Doo-wop is given to a style of vocal-based rhythm and blues music that developed in African American communities in the 1940s and achieved mainstream popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. It emerged from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Newark, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and...

group, The Moonglows

The Moonglows

The Moonglows were an American R&B and doo-wop group based in Cleveland, Ohio.-Early years:Originally formed in their native Louisville, Kentucky as the Crazy Sounds, the group moved to Cleveland, where disc jockey Alan Freed renamed them 'the Moonglows'...

in the late 1950s, he then ventured into a solo career after the group disbanded in 1960, signing with Motown Records subsidiary, Tamla. He started off as a session

Session musician

Session musicians are instrumental and vocal performers, musicians, who are available to work with others at live performances or recording sessions. Usually such musicians are not permanent members of a musical ensemble and often do not achieve fame in their own right as soloists or bandleaders...

drummer, but later ranked as the label's top-selling solo artist during the 1960s.