Anna Gordy Gaye obituary

When Anna Gordy divorced Marvin Gaye in 1975, the settlement was unusual: she would receive the proceeds from his next album – $305,000 from the advance and $295,000 in future royalties – in lieu of maintenance and child support. Gaye claimed to be broke, but since he was enjoying a period of success with such hits as What's Going On and Let's Get It On, Gordy, who has died aged 92, could have looked forward to substantial compensation for the end of their turbulent 12-year marriage. What she could not have expected was that her ex-husband would turn the album into a post-mortem examination of their relationship.

Gaye had begun the project with the aim of rushing through it to meet his obligation while paying scant attention to quality. As he became more involved in the music, however, he created a rambling but ultimately compelling catalogue of his own feelings towards a woman 17 years his senior, ranging from the tenderly reminiscent to the bitterly dismissive. Stretching over two 12-inch long-playing discs, the album was unambiguously titled Here, My Dear.

The critics didn't like it much, and neither did Anna: she briefly considered another lawsuit, this time for invasion of privacy, mentioning a sum of $5m. She would have been equally unhappy about its relative commercial failure, but time has shown it to be the last of Gaye's masterpieces for Motown, the company founded by Anna's younger brother Berry.

It was not the only imprint she left on the soul music of the 1960s and 70s. The words of some of Gaye's early hits, notably Pride and Joy, were inspired by the beautiful and sophisticated woman he had met when he was still a session drummer. She became his occasional songwriting partner, collaborating on two songs – Flyin' High and God is Love – for the classic album What's Going On, and on The Bells and Baby I'm For Real, two of the finest soul ballads of the early 1970s, both recorded by the Originals, a Motown vocal group, under Gaye's supervision.

The third of the eight children born to Berry "Pops" Gordy II and his wife Bertha, Anna was not a year old when the family moved from Oconee, Georgia, her birthplace, to Detroit, a city on whose worldwide reputation the ambitious and entrepreneurial family would have much influence. At 18, after graduating from high school, she moved to California, soon joined by Berry Jr, one of her younger brothers, who was then pursuing a career as a boxer.

Both eventually returned to Detroit, where Berry Jr would found the Motown group of labels, with Gaye among its first artists. Anna, however, had also made an early move into the music business, first as a local distributor for New York's Gone and Chicago's Chess labels and then, in 1958, as the co-founder with her sister Gwen of the Anna label, whose biggest hit was the much-covered Money (That's What I Want) by Barrett Strong.

Gaye had been hired as the label's house drummer, and when it folded he signed a new contract with Berry Jr as a singer. Marvin and Anna – "the glamour girl of the family", in Berry Jr's words – were married in 1963, the year Pride and Joy topped the R&B charts; he was 24, she 41. Three years later they adopted a son who had been born to Anna's teenaged niece, although the public was told that the boy, Marvin III, had been naturally conceived by the Gayes.

In 1972 they moved to a house in Hollywood, where Marvin built a studio. But the marriage, although founded on a mutual infatuation that never quite burnt itself out, was scarred by both parties' infidelities and by violent outbursts, sometimes in public. In 1973 Marvin left Anna for the 16-year-old Janis Hunter, who became his second wife and the mother of two more children.

They were amicably reconciled in the years immediately before Gaye was shot dead by his father in 1984. She helped the three children to scatter his ashes in the Pacific, and in 1987 she and Marvin III accepted his posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here, My Dear, with its mixture of remembered joy and present anguish, will remain as an extraordinary memorial.

She is survived by Marvin III and two grandsons, Marvin IV and Dylan Gaye.