Ronstadt's version of the song was released as a single in September 1975, reaching number 5 in Billboard, 4 in Cash Box, and 6 in Record World.

In 2010, British musician Phil Collins spent a single week (number 28) on the Billboard Adult Contemporary listing with his retooling of the song.

[5] Produced and composed with a gospel backbeat, jazz overtones and, doo-wop call and responsive vocals, "Heat Wave" was one of the first songs to exemplify the style of music later termed as the "Motown Sound".

The success of "Heat Wave" helped popularize both Martha and the Vandellas and Holland-Dozier-Holland,[2] while cementing Motown as a strong musical force.

The Martha and the Vandellas version was featured in the 1970 film The Boys in the Band, in a scene in which several of the characters perform an impromptu line dance to the recording.

Linda Ronstadt remade "Heat Wave" for her album Prisoner in Disguise which was recorded at The Sound Factory in Hollywood between February and June 1975 and released that October.

Ronstadt's sideman Andrew Gold told Rolling Stone: "[her] band had been trying to get Linda to add it to her [live] set for quite awhile [sic]...one night at a Long Island club called My Father's Place we received six encores and we'd run of tunes.

[16] According to the Rolling Stone article the perfectionism of Ronstadt's producer Peter Asher "led to many, many hours of work on 'Heat Wave' in a process that would [likely] amuse the old-line Motown musicians involved in the almost assembly-line approach that resulted in hits including Martha and the Vandellas' 1963 recording of the song.