A Motown
fanatic from Detroit has discovered Marvin Gaye’s 1964 passport hidden in an
album he bought for 50 cents from a house clearance.
The
incredible find is detailed in the latest episode of Antiques Roadshow (the
U.S. version), with the collector explaining how he came across the passport: -
“It came
to me by pure accident. For years, I worked for the Motown Museum here in
Detroit, started when I was 18 years old. I was a Motown collector – anything
Motown, I loved. And after a Motown musician had passed, we had gone to their
house to pick up some items that the family wanted to donate to the museum, and
they had said, ‘Is there anything else you wanted? Because otherwise, it’s
going to be in the estate sale this weekend.'”
He turned
down most of the albums and records as the museum already had so many, but
couldn’t resist a bargain for himself and so went back to the estate sale and
bought a pile of albums and 45s. “When I got home, I was going through them and
out of an album fell this passport. And so it literally fell into my hands,” he
explains, adding that he bought it for just 50 cents.
Antiques
Roadshow expert Laura Woolley shed some light on the item on Monday’s episode:
-
“This is
dated 1964, which is great, and it is after he added the ‘e’ to the end of his
name, because when he was signed as a solo artist with Motown he decided to add
that ‘e’ and there’s a lot of different theories – people say it’s because he
wanted to separate himself from his father or because he actually liked Sam
Cooke so much, who had an ‘e’ at the end of his name, that he wanted to imitate
his idol.
She added:
“I wouldn’t put less than $20,000 on the passport if you were to insure it.”
No one
seems to have raised the question of how exactly Gaye’s passport ended up
inside the album in another musician’s house, but there you go.
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