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Did you know? Bobby Darin, Lesley Gore, Pat Boone, and Meat Loaf also recorded for Motown.
TakeawaysBerry Gordy borrowed $800 to start Motown in 1959.Motown became one of America's most successful black-owned corporations.Motown helped define American popular music in the 1960s and 1970s.Born in Detroit in 1929, a Golden Gloves boxer in high school, Berry Gordy dropped out in 11th grade to become a professional fighter. He served in the Army during the Korean War, and opened a record shop when he came home. In his spare time, he wrote songs.
With his second wife Raynoma, Berry formed the Rayber Music Writing Company in 1957. As song doctors for aspiring artists they found, wrote, arranged material, and provided their own backup singers, The Rayber Voices. His song “Reet Petite” was a hit for fellow Detroiter and Golden Gloves boxer Jackie Wilson.
By now, Berry Gordy had met a young songwriter named William Robinson, nicknamed “Smokey Joe” for his love of western movies. “Got A Job,” a song Berry co-wrote with Jackie Wilson’s cousin Tyrone Carlo, polished at Rayber and recorded in 1958 by Smokey’s group the Miracles, earned Berry Gordy enough to start his own label.
His first choice for names was “Tammy,” after the 1957 Debbie Reynolds film “Tammy And The Bachelor.” He settled for Tamla. Tamla was America’s first black-owned record label, entering the game a few months before Sam Cooke’s SAR-Derby Records.
Tamla’s first 45 release, catalog number 101, in January of 1959, was “Come To Me” by Marv Johnson. Lacking national distribution, Tamla leased “Come To Me” to the United Artists label. Berry and Raynoma knew that future success meant first owning their own recording studio, and eventually, having the resources to do it all themselves.
Berry borrowed $800 from a Gordy family fund maintained for loans or special projects, and in August 1959 he and Raynoma purchased two houses at 2646 and 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit’s New Center area, down the street from the Fisher Building and General Motors headquarters. Initially, 2646 housed Tamla’s business offices, with the recording studio next door, downstairs from the Gordys’ second floor living quarters.
The Motown label’s first single, catalog number 1000, issued in January 1960, was “My Beloved” by The Satintones. Information on early Motown and Tamla labels included the studio’s address as well as its phone number, TRinity 8-3340.
Motown the enterprise –- not the label –- first hit big in the fall of 1960 with a Tamla release; another Miracles song: “Shop Around.” “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, four high school girls from suburban Inkster, charted in the fall of 1961. Both got the attention of this writer, then in grade school; “Shop Around” for its pitter-pat drum riffs (courtesy of session musician Marvin Gaye), and “Postman” because the radio had songs about a lot of different things; but none of them ever mentioned the mailman.
The Marevllettes’ follow-up, “Twistin’ Postman,” was often on the turntable of the portable record player we had in the one room school where I attended fourth grade. When I saw our rural route carrier making his rounds, the song naturally came to mind. Exactly what the Motown writers wanted. Their lyrics were about everyday situations kids could appreciate: finding, and keeping, girlfriends or boyfriends, school, going to parties, waiting for the mailman.
Motown was now a self-contained operation. Songs were written, published, and recorded, and business records kept, in the two original Grand Boulevard houses. As Motown needed more room, it purchased, one at a time, other houses on its block. Across the street was Maxine Powell’s finishing school (“Artist Development”), where the kids from Detroit’s inner city learned how to dress and dance, what to tell interviewers, who to tip, and how much, while traveling, and how to order in restaurants that they never dreamed they’d be visiting.
In the early sixties, British Invasion groups ruled the charts. American music meant surf - okay if you lived near the ocean –- raw Memphis soul, or sleek Motown pop. Motown proudly claimed the honor of being, as the slogan on its album covers and 45 rpm sleeves stated, “the sound of young America.” Informally, the label’s headquarters were known as “Hitsville USA.”
Songs were created factory-style. At first, only Smokey Robinson, Barrett Strong, and Eddie Holland, of the artists, wrote songs. Writers –- Lamont Dozier, Norman Whitfield, William Stevenson, Eddie and his Brother Brian, Berry sometimes - wrote. Artists performed. Motown music was a collective effort. If Marvin Gaye was recording, and Martha and the Vandellas were in the building, they were pressed into service as backup singers. Secretaries provided handclaps on Stevie Wonder and Supremes sessions. Songs were polished to perfection. They’ve been criticized for sounding mass-produced. They had to be.
When Motown opened for business, racial boundaries on the radio dial had begun to disappear, but barriers remained. There were the black stations –- they were called other things, but we called them “soul” stations - featuring blues and R&B, sounding as rough and down-home as the music they played; and the slick, formatted top-40 stations offering a more refined musical product, playing only black records a general, mostly white, audience would like. Berry Gordy’s goal was to keep Motown songs from being relegated to the soul stations, and get them on top-40 white radio.
Enter a collective of studio musicians informally known as The Funk Brothers, who gave Motown its distinctive, powerful sound. Songs were mixed for AM radio. The studio has a micro-powered AM transmitter that allowed session producers to hear finished mixes as potential buyers would, on a radio in a car’s dashboard, or on a transistor set. The horn sections sounded bold and bright, and Benny Benjamin’s drums and Earl Van Dyke’s keyboards provided the texture spices add to a meal. At the bottom was James Jamerson’s bass guitar, making those car radio speakers work. The Funk Brothers played on more American number one records than any other musicians, but weren’t credited until the 1970s.
Song lyrics dealt with safe topics; usually boy-girl dilemmas, falling in, and out of, love, and having a good time.
Motown, as a black-owned label, was also criticized for its lack of social consciousness at a time when the civil rights movement dominated the headlines. Being safe, however, meant top-40 airplay. Only in 1968, when The Supremes’ “Love Child,” and the under-rated “Does Your Mama Know About Me” by Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, were released, did Motown lyrics begin to touch on social issues of the day.
The issue of racial equality wasn’t lost on Motown, though. Today, when you hear Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” oration, or Dr. King telling an audience in Memphis, the night before he died, that he’d been to the mountaintop, you’re hearing tracks from the three albums of speeches issued on Motown’s Gordy subsidiary label.
Motown also spoke for civil rights in a more subtle way. The Temptations and Four Tops, sharp-dressed cats executing dance moves learned at the finishing school on American Bandstand, and the foxy Supremes in their sequined gowns on the Ed Sullivan show, did as much to sell the concept of equality as any speech or march.
During its peak years, Motown helped make Detroit a special place at a special time. You could apply for a job at the auto plants in the morning and go to work that night. When you saved enough cash, you could buy a new Mustang, made in River Rouge, designed in Dearborn, and cruise around with the radio tuned to hometown WKNR –- maybe you passed its Michigan Avenue studios on the way to work –- with “Keener 13” playing another new song created in the Grand Boulevard hit factory across town. When you’re young, and it’s all happening, you never stop to think that it could end someday.
Motown outgrew the Hitsville USA recording studio and moved to larger quarters near downtown Detroit in 1967. It outgrew Detroit and moved to Los Angeles in 1972. L.A. was the entertainment capital and, like Bandstand’s move from Philadelphia, Motown’s exodus was a matter of being where the showbiz action was.
Before Motown left town, one more classic album, whose songs are as timeless as any in the history of popular music, was recorded: Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” It’s also the first album on which The Funk Brothers are credited. On it are three songs –- the title track, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” and “Inner City Blues” –- whose lyrics are as relevant now as when they were new in 1971: “War is not the answer . . . oil wasted on the oceans . . . make me want to holler, throw up both my hands . . . ” People hearing the songs for the first time can’t believe they were written over thirty-five years ago.
In 1990, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela visited North America and spoke at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. In South African-accented English, he told the gathering that he had always been a fan of music from “Motor Town” and artists such as “Steve Wonder.” The crowd cheered, and the old stadium seemed to vibrate. It did again when Mr. Mandela quoted some particularly meaningful Motown lyrics, from “What’s Going On,” rolling the letter r, “brrrotha . . . brrrotha . . . there is far too many of you . . . dy-ing . . . ”
Motown is gone, and the original studios and offices are now a museum. When driving in from Flint to see a Tigers game, it became a ritual to exit the freeway at Grand Boulevard and zig-zag a slightly longer path to the ball park in order to pass the Hitsville USA house. The drive became more special if the car radio played a song that had been recorded in the now world-famous building. It always made me think that Detroit, brought to its knees by a weak economy, labeled a ruined shell unfit to live in by people who never came here, would once again be great. (Motor Town!)
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