Marvin Gaye scored his first
Billboard Top 40 pop single with "Hitch Hike," which peaked at number 30 in early 1963. Gaye wrote the song in collaboration with Motown staff producers and songwriters William "Mickey" Stevenson and Clarence Paul: "‘Hitch Hike' was Marvin's concept," Paul told David Ritz, author of ‘Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye.' "He had the groove worked out when we started helping him. That's him playing drums and piano on the track."
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Hitchhiking - i.e., traveling by securing free rides from passing vehicles - surged in popularity during the Depression and throughout World War II before falling off during the economic boom of the 1950s. But wanderlust gripped young Americans as the 1960s dawned. "You had this whole generation of young people who kind of felt confined by a sense of suburban comfort, and wanted to explore and get a more authentic sense of what the world is about," historian Jack Reid, author of the book ‘Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation,' told NPR in 2020. "And so you have young people hitchhiking for adventure, people reading [Jack Kerouac's novel] ‘On the Road' and wanting to get out and explore the world, and meet a whole cross-section of people they wouldn't otherwise."
The classic thumb-out hitchhiker pose inspired Gaye to develop a corresponding "Hitch Hike" dance move, which he performed live on ABC's ‘American Bandstand.' Gaye demonstrated the dance again when he performed "Hitch Hike" during the ‘T.A.M.I. Show,' the pioneering 1964 concert film in which he appears alongside Motown colleagues the Miracles and the Supremes as well as James Brown, The Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. The Stones went on to cover "Hitch Hike" for their 1965 LP ‘Out of Our Heads,' and the Velvet Underground lifted the song's staccato opener for "There She Goes Again," from their landmark Andy Warhol-produced debut LP. "The riff is a soul thing - Marvin Gaye's ‘Hitch Hike,' with a nod to the Impressions," the Velvets' John Cale told Uncut magazine in 2012. "That was the easiest song of all." 
