Songfacts®:

• This song was written by the Motown songwriter Leon Ware and his songwriting partner "T-Boy" Ross (Diana Ross' brother). Ware originally intended to record it himself, but after Motown CEO Berry Gordy heard a rough version of it, he convinced Ware to give the song to Marvin Gaye.
• When Gaye recorded the song in 1975, the singer was inspired by his relationship with his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Janis Hunter. The couple met two years earlier when Gaye, who was at the time married to Berry Gordy's sister Anna, was working on the Let's Get It On album at the LA-based Hitsville West recording studio. Janis' mother was a big fan of the singer, and the two of them came into the studio one day to watch the Motown star at work. Gaye was immediately struck by the teenager and they started casually dating afterwards. After Janis turned eighteen, she moved in with him and they had two children together. A year after Gaye recorded this song, the couple married, but their relationship was mostly tumultuous and by 1979, they had separated.
• Ernie Barnes' Sugar Shack painting was adapted to be the cover of Gaye's I Want You album. Barnes was an interesting character: as a teenager, he preferred to draw while his high school classmates participated in sports. Despite his artistic inclination, he graduated with 26 athletic scholarship offers, and was immediately drafted into the American Football League (now the NFL). Barnes then spent five years playing offensive guard for the San Diego Chargers and Denver Broncos and was designated as "Official Artist of the American Football League." The New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin spotted Barnes' artistic potential and replaced his football salary for a year, so he could devote himself to painting. In 1974, television producer Norman Lear commissioned Barnes to paint a series of original pieces for his new television CBS sitcom Good Times. One of them was Sugar Shack, which was in the show's opening credits for four years. Barnes died on April 27, 2009 after a brief illness.
• Robert Palmer had a UK top ten hit in 1991 with a medley of this song and another Marvin Gaye number, "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)." Diana Ross also covered the song on her 2007 I Love You album.
• Marvin Gaye was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best R&B Male Vocal Performance with "I Want You" but lost to Stevie Wonder for "I Wish." Gaye previously lost the award to Wonder in 1974 when "Superstition" beat out "Let's Get It On." Although they were professional rivals, their relationship was one of deep respect: Wonder would perform "Lighting Up The Candles" at Gaye's funeral in 1984.