Writing ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ For Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell…
Knowing the obstacles ahead, Ashford & Simpson wrote this song before shopping it to Motown.
Interviewer: “I’ve always loved your song ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,’ which has such a positive, uplifting concept. How did you and Nick come up with the idea for this song?”
“That’s really borne out of real life, because in the early days Nick was a visitor to New York, and he was determined,” Simpson elaborated. “He told me he was walking down Central Park West (in Manhattan), and looking at the buildings and seeing them as mountains, and what he had to overcome.”
“And he was determined that New York was not going to do him in, and he was gonna make it, even though the odds were certainly against him, being a struggling songwriter (laughs). But he said that the buildings really looked like mountains to him, and that’s when the thought came… ‘Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough.’ You know that determination, which is probably what people feel (when they hear the song), even though we turned it into a love song. But the energy and the initial thrust came out of that overcoming.”
And, of course, Diana Ross made it a bigger hit years later.
