The story behind Motown is
primarily of one Detroit man's burning ambition, perseverance, and
talent. The company's beginnings go back to the late 1950's, when Berry
Gordy, Jr. finally caught a break as a songwriter after a few years of scratching at the surface of the music business. It was a pivotal
event in a career marked by several fits and starts.
Berry Gordy
One of eght children, Gordy was born November 28,1929. He dropped out of high school and went through careers as a boxer and soldier before dipping his toes in musical waters by opening a jazz record store, the 3-D Record Mart, after he got out of the service in 1953, however, and Gordy moved on to several other jobs, including a stint on the ford assembly line in Detroit.
In his spare time, Gordy began to write R & B songs and tried to sell them to local performers. He spent the next couple of years writing, recording demos, and promoting his compositions - sending them to magazines, songwriting contests, and record companies - with little to show for it other than a small name for himself within the Detroit music scene.
Everything changed when a song he wrote for Jackie Wilson,"Reet Petite" became a hit for Brunswick Records in 1957. Although he pocketed only $1000 on the project. Gordy fueled his reputation as an up-coming songwriter and producer by following up with several other successes for Wilson over the next year or so, including "Lonely Teardrops" the first song Gordy wrote that reached number one on the R & B chart and cracked the top ten on the pop chart.
At this point in his career, Gordy primarily still sold his compositions to other record labels, who then produced the songs themselves. But Gordy was unsatisfied with the quality of many of the releases and he longed to run his own company - to write, produce, and market his music himself. So in 1959, armed with his modest reputation, the money form his recent songs, and $800 borrowed from his family, Berry Gordy officially launched his new career as an independent record producer.
The Marvelettes
From the start, Gordy tirelessly scoured Detroit for talent. One of the most important connections he made early on was Smokey Robinson, the lead singer and songwriter for a group called The Miracles. He and Robinson were the heart and soul of the early organization, personally handling almost all the songwriting and production chores. The pair continued to solicit and nurture some of the best songwriting, production, and performing talent in the area, plowing the fields for the incredibly fertile period that was to come.
The Miracles themselves were responsible for the first real chart successes completely owned by Gordy, who continued to sell his increasingly popular songs to other record labels - including tunes by The Miracles, Marv Johnson and future Motown label, Tamla. (Motown,Gordy,and Tamla were the principal labels: Soul,V.I.P.,and Rare Earth joined the fold by the end of the 1960's.) While Gordy, Robinson, and their skeletal staff scored enough modest successes early on to keep spirits up, the company's ultimate survival was hardly a foregone conclusion in the early part of the decade - Motown was not yet automatic hit machine it would become. Gordy, however,remained relentless, and constantly exhorted his troops to think big, Everybody pitched in at all levels - sending out records, contacting disc jockeys, etc.
Before long, the commitment paid off. Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)" was the first solid Motown Hit in 1960. The Miracles' "Shop Around," released later the same year, was the first million-seller, reaching number two on the pop chart by january 1961. The Motown era had arrived.
Over the next ten years, Motown would transform itself into the largest independent record company in the world (and the largest business of any kind owned by an African-American), steadily refining a unique assembly line song production process that was as inventive as it was successful. The initioal hits by Strong and The Miracles at the beginning of the decade and the explosion of The Jackson 5 in the early 1970s were simply bookends to an unprecedented run of commercial and artistic coups. In the mid-sixties Motown was especially dominant, and the company-more than any other American group or record label- fought toe-to-toe with the British invasion bands on the charts.
Martha & The Vandellas The numbers are astounding: Between 1960 and 1970 sixty-seven percent of the singles Motown released hit the charts (the industry standard "hit ratio" is around ten percent). Fifty-six of those songs were number one on either the pop or R & B charts, and twenty-one topped both. In 1964, when the Beatles began setting some records of their own, Motown released sixty singles, seventy percent of which hit the charts-and nineteen made it to number one. The Supremes alone racked up five consecutive number one pop hits starting with "Where Did Our Love Go?" in 1964. In 1966, Motown's hit ratio topped seventy-five percent.
But the numbers, as impressive as they are, don't necessarily tell the whole story. Bobby Vinton's "There! I've Said It Again" and the Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love" both spent more time at number on in 1964 than the Supremes "Where Did Our Love Go?" Which song of the three sounds freshest today? "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Loavely Daughter" by Herman's hermits was the fourth most popular song of 1965, while "My Girl" by the Temptations checked in at number seventeen (both reached number one). When was the last time you sat down at the piano and knocked off a few bars of "Mrs. Brown...?"
As the sixties progressed, Motown continued to expand, absorbing rival record labels, and resuscitating the careers of acts (like The Four Tops) who had languished with other record companies before hooking up with Motown's crack songwriting and production corps. (By 1966 the company had one hundred performing acts under contract.) As its chart dominance continued-spearheaded by the songs of Smokey Robinson and the Holland-Dozier-Holland Trio, performed by The Supremes, The Four Tops, and The Temptations-Motown appeared to realize its self-declared title as "The Sound of Young America. "The roster of artists and staff continued to grow, and although it had taken over six other houses sorrounding the original office on Grand Boulivard, Motown was obliged to relocate to downtown Detroit in 1968.