Motown was an important influence on The Rolling Stones. Although the British blues boom mainly focused on the Mississippi Delta and Chicago blues, Detroit’s mix of R&B, soul, pop, and rock was also popular across the water. The first Rolling Stones album is almost exclusively straight blues, but the one Motown song that they took on was Marvin Gaye’s classic ‘Can I Get a Witness?’.
Written by the in-house songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, ‘Can I Get a Witness?’ was born out of the shared gospel roots that the three writers had. “That was the thing a lot of black people played; a lot of gospel music and a lot of classical,” Dozier told NME in 1984. “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,” he added. “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.”
With memories of preachers pleading for witnesses in the church, Holland-Dozier-Holland crafted a pleading song of love and infidelity. Only one man was right for ‘Can I Get a Witness?’ – Funk Brothers drummer Marvin Gaye. Gaye had been put on hold as a solo artist for a short while at Motown after his first singles bombed, but the success of 1963’s ‘Pride and Joy’ let him step up from behind the drum kit.
a Witness?’ And he was right as well; he was more right than we were,” bassist Bill Wyman later admitted. “And, of course, when Mick and Keith got into writing, the songs came out more like he was looking for. Keith was always more into Soul music than me or Charlie, and Mick loved soul performers like Wilson Pickett and James Brown.”
During the sessions where The Rolling Stones recorded their cover version of ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, the group took the song’s iconic keyboard line and reappropriated it into an instrumental featuring Mick Jagger on harmonica and Ian Stewart on organ. Despite being a clear take on ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, ‘Now I’ve Got a Witness’ wound up being credited to Nanker Phelge, the moniker used on compositions written by the entire group.
