Berry Gordy Jr.
He made the Motown sound a part of our cultural history
ew people can shrug off years of career disappointments and then go on to have a profound impact on the world.
It would have been only natural for Berry Gordy Jr. to be discouraged after his boxing career sputtered and his record store failed in the 1950s. It would have been easy, once the Detroit native landed an $86.40-a-week job on a Lincoln-Mercury assembly line, to just relax into the job and forget those dreams of writing and recording music.
Instead, Gordy outfoxed the assembly line, fastening upholstery and chrome strips to body frames so quickly that he had time left over to work on songs like “To Be Loved,” “Lonely Teardrops” and, of course, “Reet Petite,” all destined to be hits for Highland Park’s Jackie Wilson.
But writing hits still wasn’t enough; the scrappy Detroiter discovered that, like singers, songwriters don’t always get paid by the record companies. To cut out the middleman and put more cash in his pocket, in 1959, he started his own label with seed money from his business-savvy parents. Gordy’s venture grew to become Motown Records, one of the most influential record companies in music history.
Motown has always been more than the sum of its parts. Where would kids from the projects like Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson have gone if they didn’t have Motown to visit and Gordy to polish off their rough edges and find them the best songs? Where would Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson have found an outlet for those story-poems that grabbed every teen-age heart in the ’60s and continue to affect people of all ages?
Even the musicians who felt left behind when Gordy took Motown and moved to Los Angeles in 1972 admit that while it lasted, Motown sessions bought them comfortable houses, fancy cars and reputations, even now, as architects of the Motown sound.
“Berry knew how to build an artist,” says Martha Reeves, one of his premier divas. “Once he got to a point, it was up to you to take the lesson and go on and do your job and keep yourself on your own feet, or you’d fall by the wayside. They gave us everything we needed. We didn’t have common sense, but he couldn’t help us with that. Everything else, if he thought we needed it, we got it.”
Motown has always been touted as a black record company, but Gordy always stresses the company’s diverse workforce.
“We were black-owned, but interracial,” he told The News in 1994. “Blacks, whites, Arabs and Jews all working together, when that wasn’t common.”
The chairman, as he is still known to his associates, also bristles at the phrase “black music.”
“I don’t like to call it black music,” he said. “I call it music with black stars. Either it’s good or it’s bad. And everybody’s the same. White people are the same as black people. We all want love, we all want happiness, we all want peace. Our problem is communicating. You think I hate you, and I think you hate me. That’s the problem, I think, with the world. What Motown music did was to bring out the sameness — everybody wants love, everybody wants happiness.”
— Susan Whitall
