The Temptations - David Ruffin, Melvin Franklin, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, Otis Williams
ohhhhh the days of the Motown sound. some of the greatest music ever produced.
Posted on 12/14/2005 6:03:04 AM PST by lunarbicep
In 1959 Elvis dominated the airwaves, while Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, and Jackie Wilson—the pioneers of rhythm-and-blues—were confined to the lower reaches of the dial, paid a fraction of what the King made imitating their sound. On December 14, 1959, an entrepreneurial genius from Detroit found a way to change that. He started Motown Records, which, with its unbeatable sound and unmistakable style, would launch African-American entertainers to the top of the charts and out of the “race records” ghetto.
Berry Gordy, Jr., was born in 1929 in Detroit, the grandson of a Georgia slave. His parents had moved north as part of the Great Migration, African-Americans leaving the South in search of industrial jobs. The migration had brought with it not only labor but also jazz and blues, and Detroit had a booming music scene. Gordy dropped out of high school and tried to make it as a boxer before serving in the Korean War. He returned from the war to an assembly-line job with Ford and wrote songs in his free time. He eventually quit the job to write professionally for local groups including the Matadors.
In 1959, egged on by the Matadors’ lead singer, a teenager named Smokey Robinson, Gordy borrowed $800 from his family to start a small record label called Tamla, later to be known as Motown. He reached into the rich loam of Detroit’s jazz scene, putting together a house band of musicians who had cut their teeth playing with Charlie Parker, Muddy Waters, Sarah Vaughan, and Ray Charles. The band, which called itself the Funk Brothers, was the heartbeat of Motown, taking the scraps of music that arrangers gave it and building songs on the fly, layering up from the drums. On the dirt floor of a garage at 2648 West Grand Boulevard—Hitsville, U.S.A—the musicians gathered daily, cranking out songs with assembly-line speed and regularity. Martha Reeves, of Martha and the Vandellas, described the time as “like a river constantly flowing—talent and creation constantly flowing.”
Motown’s first No. 1 hit on the R & B charts was “Shop Around,” by the Matadors, now renamed the Miracles. Cowritten by Robinson and Gordy, it was a blues-inflected number until Gordy pulled the musicans in for a 2 a.m. recording session to remake it. He wanted the song to appeal to a broader audience, so they turned it into an upbeat pop confection with a swinging beat and a doo-wop inspired chorus. That blending of styles became the foundation of the Motown sound.
The Motown sound was based on the lively swing of rhythm and blues combined with tight harmonies reminiscent of gospel. The groove was anchored fearlessly by the incomparable bass of James Jamerson and the drummers Richard (“Pistol”) Allen and Benny Benjamin; Earl Van Dyke played “gorilla piano,” pounding so forcefully that his instrument needed to be tuned daily. Joe Messina, who cooked up the backbeat with his funk-inflected guitar, remarked, “I think the magic was that we listened to each other . . . and we liked one another.”
The relentlessly danceable music soon broke out of the R & B charts with the Marvelettes’ catchy “Please Mr. Postman,” which shot to No. 1 nationwide. With his core of virtuosic—and unsung—musicians, Gordy was able to launch the careers of the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Jackson 5, and the Four Tops. All had hits in the top 10. In fact, by the mid-1960s three out of four Motown releases were charting, and 68 singles had sold more than a million copies apiece. Gordy was the richest African-American, with an annual income of more than $10 million in 1972.
He had a reputation for being overbearing and ignoring musicians’ union regulations, but he was crafting groups from the bottom up, teaching them how to speak, stand, and dress in addition to sing, turning working-class Detroit natives into debutantes. In a country just tentatively desegregating, he had to counter stereotypes of black musicians as sexual predators. While Elvis gyrated, the Four Tops played perfect gentlemen in matching suits. The smooth, sophisticated, and stylish Motown royalty served as ambassadors to a white world, effectively integrating music. The musician Ben Harper remarked in the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, “Motown was America’s introduction to soul music . . . and that’s a powerful music. It’s the music of hope.”
Motown hits like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Dancing in the Streets,” and “Where Did Our Love Go” had wide appeal and jostled with white artists’ songs for spots on the top 10. In 1965 a tour took Gordy’s Detroit acts to sold-out shows in England while the Beatles invaded America covering Motown tunes.
In 1972 Gordy relocated Motown to Hollywood, but many of the musicians who had formed the core of the in-house band stayed behind, and the label lost some of its luster. During the 1970s there were some successful new acts, such as Lionel Richie, but they didn’t hit the top 10 as often. “Motown would have been better off with the record thing if we had stayed in Detroit,” Gordy eventually admitted. He sold Motown to MCA in 1988, and it remains an active label, with artists including India.Arie, Erykah Badu, and Stevie Wonder—the only musician left from the days of classic Motown. But it is no longer the independent powerhouse it once was.
Berry Gordy was the first black entertainment mogul with anything like his eight record labels, production company, publishing company, and talent management agency, all under his control. His savvy business sense and eye for the perfect hook made him a model for the likes of Russell Simmons and Sean (“P. Diddy”) Combs. But the most important legacy of Motown was the music—gorgeous, accomplished pop that still swings after more than 40 years.
ohhhhh the days of the Motown sound. some of the greatest music ever produced.
I love the 60's Motown music. Think I'll pull out my Motown CD and play it again.
"The Sound Of Young America." Beautiful. And it actually is worth going to Detroit to see the Motown Museum, housed in the old studios on Grand Boulevard. I always thought the first Motown-owned release was "Money" by Barrett Strong, albeit under the Anna label.
Contrasting what Motown put out with what's being done today (by both black and white artists/groups) makes me want to puke.
In 1965 I rigged up my radio to pull in a station from Windsor Ontario at nights to hear Motown.
James Jamerson will always be my top influence as a bass player, followed by Rocco Prestia (Tower Of Power) and everyone who played bass for James Brown.
Get some digitally re-mastered CD's for fantastic sound.
Smokey Robinson; voice of an angel.
Probably CKLW.
The Detroit PBS station just played a documentary on CKLW, arguably the most influential radio station in the western hemisphere in the late 60's. Pretty good show about an awesome era. I missed most of it but was a regular listener in the early 70's.
Motown and strong, independent radio stations like CKLW will unfortunately never happen again in our current corporate culture.
that was cool !! 10 yrs old & Michael was doing James Brown better then James himself
Check Ebay, you can find almost anything there.
I hate this crap.
First of all, Big Joe Turner had an enormous career as a popular blues singer in the 1940s and was a top-billed, well-paid star. By the late 1950s Turner himself had made an artistic decision to leave the boogie-woogie and rock'n'roll market and focus on the blues/jazz vocal style that had scored him his biggest hits 15 years before.
Ruth Brown was also a very successful star who did quite well and she retired in 1960 at the top of her career to spend time with her family.
Jackie Wilson was a gifted singer but he used a lot of substandard material on his recordings and was considered a live star, not a record act - he had a string of R&B hits, but he could not match the success of Ray Charles who was a studio perfectionist.
Elvis' success was based on the fact that he was able to combine the influence of rural and urban black blues vocals with country and white rural blues vocals and a backbeat.
Elvis was extrmely talented and he was doing things that no one else was doing. Every artist has influences, but great artists take them and make something new.
Elvis did not imitate his contemporary Jackie Wilson in any noticeable way, nor did he imitate Ruth Brown (?!? what a weird claim!) and Big Joe Turner was an inescapable influence on anyone - black or white - who sang blues vocals.
Motown was a great label in its own right and you don't need to tear down Sun or Atlantic to make that claim.
A lot of music from the 60s and 70s just provokes laughter when it is played now - but classic Motown records like those of the Supremes, Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the young Stevie Wonder do not.
Also, Motown gets a ton of press but Atlantic and Stax put out a lot of great soul, funk and rhythm and blues records too, with acts like Ray Charles, Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett.
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