Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  Stevenson said that Martha Reeves constantly showed up to audition. The way he told the story, he already had a secretary who came to like Martha and would say to him, “Oh, that girl is here again.” Stevenson recalled, “I thought she had a good voice, not great, a good voice. She had a unique sound.”

  One day he had to run out of the office and he asked her to answer the phone. He was impressed with her efficiency, and since his secretary was about to leave he offered her the job. According to Mickey, Martha said, “I won’t be nobody’s secretary.” So Mickey made her his assistant.

  According to Martha, she worked there for three weeks with no discussion of pay until her father insisted, “You better get some of that man’s money or you won’t be going back to his company.” So she asked Stevenson and he started paying her thirty-five dollars weekly.

  For Martha, the salary wasn’t the goal. She could see that once you found a place in this company, opportunities would turn up. She would wait for hers. She was not the only local girl doing this. Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard, and Diana Ross were also drifting through the little house looking for chances. Their upbringings had been similar to Martha’s. Mary Wilson was born in the Mississippi Delta, Flo Ballard was born in Detroit of parents from Mississippi, and Diana Ross was born in Detroit and knew her neighbor Smokey Robinson as a child.

  Wilson grew up with the Reverend Franklin’s three daughters and listened to them sing at their father’s church. When Mary was fourteen years old, in 1958, she entered a local talent contest. Florence Ballard was another contestant and the two started talking about how to advance their singing career. It was not an uncommon conversation for black kids in 1958 Detroit. A year later, in the eighth grade, the two, now close friends, joined a girl quartet put together by three male singers from Alabama including Eddie Kendricks, who later became the star falsetto tenor of Motown’s the Temptations. The male group, the Primes, wanted an accompanying sister act called the Primettes. The Primettes were Ballard and Wilson and a big-eyed girl Wilson had met occasionally who lived catty-corner to Wilson’s home in the Brewster Housing Project—Diana Ross. The fourth singer changed several times but the three stayed together. Flo Ballard, who was thought to have the strongest voice, sang lead, and the Primettes came to be thought of as Ballard’s group.

  When school was out for the afternoon, the group hitchhiked across town just to hang around at Hitsville, looking for a chance. Martha Reeves knew Wilson and Ballard because they had all been in the music program at Northeastern High School together. Motown occasionally used the Primettes as backup for Mary Wells, changing their name to the Supremes.

  Meanwhile, Martha said in an interview that she got her first recording when union rules required an additional vocalist on a session. But her Motown career was really launched in July 1962, when the A&R office was asked to arrange backup for Marvin Gaye’s first R&B album. Gaye had endless talents. He was a good drummer and an excellent pianist and he played on a number of the earlier Motown recordings, including Stevie Wonder’s early albums on the Tamla label when Stevie was only eleven and twelve years old. Gaye was also a good songwriter, and Gordy saw this as his greatest talent, and was constantly pushing him to write songs. But Gaye resisted this. “I didn’t want to be one of the cats behind the scene,” Gaye told Ritz. “I wanted to get out front.”

  So with some reluctance Gordy let him record albums of pop standards. They did not sell well. He had failed as the black Sinatra. “Be a songwriter,” Gordy insisted. But Gaye, who as he once predicted, argued more with Gordy than anyone else—he could, because he was family—persisted. Now he was recording an R&B album.

  Motown recordings were often put together with whoever was available. Can you go in the studio and sing backup? We need someone for hand clapping. This was why young hopefuls liked to be there.

  Martha arranged the backup by calling in her old group, Rosalind Ashford, Annette Beard, and Gloria Jean Williamson, who were then hired for five dollars a side. The four of them were asked to come up with a background for a song written by Gaye and Stevenson called “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” which many said was a good description of handsome Marvin Gaye. The four stood behind Gaye and improvised, all five on the same hanging microphone. The song was Gaye’s first hit, reaching number 8 on Billboard’s R&B chart, which at the time was labeled “the black singles chart,” and 46 on the white pop singles chart. The song not only made Gaye famous, it made the backup singers a group.

  Here the story diverges into conflicting versions. According to Martha, Gordy called down the stairs and told them they had an hour to come up with a name for the group. According to Martha, she made up a combination of the Detroit great Della Reese and a street in her neighborhood, Van Dyke Street—the Vandellas. The explanation is plausible because Martha was always a big Detroit booster, but it is not the way the other Vandellas remember it. According to Rosalind Ashford:

  Gordy said you have half an hour or I come up with the name. After a half hour he shouted down, “Have you got a name yet?” He said, “You are going to be called the Vandellas.” I never knew what it meant. Everybody called us the vandals. They joked that a vandella was a female vandal.

  “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” followed in December by “Hitch Hike,” launched a string of hits for Gaye with the Vandellas on backup. This success almost guaranteed that the Vandellas would soon get offered their own song, especially given Gordy’s interest in developing girl groups. They recorded two songs that year, neither of which were hits, but the following year, 1963, they got a song from the unstoppable songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland.

  Eddie Holland was with Berry Gordy almost from his start as a successful singer. Gordy admired Eddie’s powerful tenor and thought he could make him a star. But Eddie had a dread of public performance. Gordy was also impressed with his “look-alike brother” Brian, who seemed to have a profound understanding of music. Gordy thought Brian might end up another Smokey Robinson. Brian was considered one of Motown’s best early songwriters, most famous for “Please Mr. Postman,” sung by the Marvelettes, which was a number 1 hit in 1961. Lamont Dozier sang for the Anna label and later for various Motown labels. In March 1963 they decided to team up, with Dozier and Brian as composers and Eddie as the principal lyricist and arranger. Together they wrote some two hundred songs, including many of Motown’s biggest hits between 1963 and 1967.

  Their first song, “Come and Get These Memories,” was also Martha and the Vandella’s first Top 40 hit. It was followed by “Heat Wave,” which made number 1 on the R&B chart and number 4 on the pop chart. Martha and the Vandellas were stars. The song had a driving beat and an irresistible dance rhythm, and Martha Reeve’s voice had an almost mystical urgency. This sound was to become the Vandellas’ trademark.

  • • •

  Motown was developing a sizable stable of stars, and Thomas “Bean” Bowles, the lanky reed player, came up with the idea of a Motown touring company, the Motown Revue. He booked ninety-four one-night stands in three months, traveling on a bus with the words Motor City Tour printed on it. Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Supremes, and twelve-year-old Stevie Wonder all went on the road in the fall of 1962.

  The tour went to New York and Washington and the Midwest but was also to sweep through the heart of the Deep South at the height of the civil rights movement. Though most of them had southern roots, few knew the reality of being black in the South. Gaye had grown up in segregated Washington, DC, but not the Deep South. Most had never been there, or had moved when they were too young to remember. Martha Reeves had gone back to Alabama a few times with her family. They would switch to less comfortable cars at the back of the train before they crossed the Mason-Dixon line, and when they got to their relatives, they quickly went to the family farm and stayed there until they had to leave.

  “You didn’t talk about it,” said Martha. “You
didn’t say, ‘Hey, they hate us down here, so be careful.’ When I went down to Alabama with my family, my parents kept us close to the farm. They ground their own corn and made wonderful corn bread and grits.”

  Mary Wells, without thinking, took a sip from a white-only water fountain, and at first when a crowd started to gather, she thought that it was because she was recognized as a star. In Montgomery, Alabama, they were playing to a segregated audience that was surrounded by plainclothesmen with clubs. Anyone who tried to stand up or, worse, dance, would get clubbed. Finally Smokey Robinson stepped to a microphone and asked the men to stop clubbing people and to back off. They did, and the audience started dancing, and soon the blacks and whites were no longer separated.

  By the early 1960s, Freedom Rides—black people sitting in white sections of buses to challenge the legality of segregated buses, the tactic initiated by Bayard Rustin in the 1940s—had become a central tactic of SNCC. Motown toured the South at the height of the SNCC Freedom Rides, and a busload of northern-looking black people appeared to southern police exactly like Freedom Riders. The Motown Revue would pull into a town, expecting crowds of fans, and instead would be met by police with shotguns. In Montgomery, Alabama, they performed to a racially integrated audience on a baseball field. As they left, gunshots were heard, and the tour group later realized that there were bullet holes in their bus sign and in a window.

  In the urgency of the 1960s, when Motown was accused of ignoring the politics all around them, some of the artists would point to such incidents and say that they had been involved in civil rights. Martha said, “We were always political. We sold love in front of segregated audiences. That’s political.” But she also admitted to having no interest in taking on the South while on that tour. “I was traveling on a bus trying to sell music and being accused of being a Freedom Rider,” she said many years later.

  But many Motown artists began to reflect on what Mary Wilson called “the Motown bubble,” the way they lived in Detroit in their Motown world and were completely ignoring the important things going on in the larger world.

  • • •

  The Motown bubble was becoming a troubling issue as the political and social conflicts of the 1960s heated and became ever more polarizing. For Gordy and many others in music, the lesson of the 1950s was to avoid controversy. But in the 1960s, people wanted to know where you stood. As Elvis Presley demonstrated, to avoid controversy was to risk irrelevance. Could Motown really be “the voice of young America” and say nothing about the issues of the day that were consuming young Americans?

  Gordy wanted to be revolutionary without being controversial. He wanted, as Robespierre complained to the Convention in 1792, “a Revolution without a revolution.” Motown broke all kinds of taboos about race and sex, but Gordy did it with the understanding that breaking taboos had become fashionable. Songs were not about change or about the issues of change. They were about love and dating and sex and infidelity. But for black people to be singing about these things to white people, and for white couples to be dancing to black people talking about love and even sex, was a strong political statement that the time for integration, for tearing down racial barriers, had come. The statement was always made very carefully. Motown would be about integration by the way it did things, but not by what it said or, to use a popular phrase of the day, by direct action.

  With few exceptions, Motown people did not participate in the civil rights movement. They did not go south to march. But it was all about integration in its way. As Amiri Baraka pointed out, blacks in America were always so marginal that “merely by being a Negro in America, one was a nonconformist.” Motown moved black out of the marginal and into the mainstream. It was the model set down by Booker T. Washington, not the one by W. E. B. Du Bois.

  Gordy was not, as is often suggested, apolitical. In 1957 he supported Charles Diggs Sr.’s successful bid to be a black U.S. congressman. In 1963 he created another Motown label called Black Forum, whose stated purpose was to present “ideas and voices of the worldwide struggle of black people to create a new era.” Starting with Martin Luther King Jr., Black Forum recorded speeches and talks by an increasingly controversial lineup of black activists, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, and Stokely Carmichael.

  Nationally, the civil rights movement reached its height in the early 1960s. It had grown from a hard local struggle in southern communities to a movement garnering national and international attention. Martin Luther King Jr., a rebellious political activist still in his early thirties, was becoming a major figure. In 1964 he would become the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Soon he would be representing one of two opposing factions that would splinter the movement. But by 1963 he and the movement had become so recognized that it would have been at best very odd for a leading black enterprise to take no interest in it.

  How could a black-owned music company in an increasingly black city not be part of this movement, especially since the movement was linked to music? Just as music was an integral part of the black church, it was central to the civil rights movement. In African religions that seek to bring spirits to possess worshipers, it is believed that only through music can the spirits be brought down to people. Folk songs and traditional hymns like “This Little Light of Mine,” and “We Will Overcome”—“will” changed to “shall” by the movement—became songs of the movement, so-called freedom songs. James Farmer reworked a thirties trade union song “Which Side Are You On?” and even Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack” became “Get Your Rights Jack.” Freedom songs were recorded and sold and performed in concert halls, including Carnegie Hall, and what started as comfort for scared people marching and locked in southern jails became popular culture. In 1962 folksinger Pete Seeger advised SNCC to form their own singing groups and raise money for the organization through concerts and recordings. Cordell Reagon and Bernice Johnson, who later married, formed a quartet called Freedom Singers.

  It was Seeger’s contention that all great political movements had to have their own songs. In history this has usually been true. The American, French, and Russian Revolutions, as well as the American labor movement, all had their songs of inspiration. In October 2011, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, in which thousands camped out in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and in most other major American cities as well as numerous others around the world to protest the abuses of big banks and finance companies, the New York Times music section ran an article with the kind of astute sense of history that is rare in newspapers. They wrote that though this movement appeared to be sweeping across the world, it lacked songs. The article quoted an array of historians and music critics questioning if this movement could survive without its own songs. The civil rights movement, however, had songs.

  • • •

  Much of the music industry, though surprisingly little of it R&B, came out for civil rights. Harry Belafonte was a close supporter of King, as was Joan Baez. When a March on Washington was announced for August 1963, Josephine Baker flew in from Paris. Bobby Darin, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Marian Anderson, Dizzy Gillespie, and Mahalia Jackson were all there. So at the march, folk, jazz, rock, classical, and gospel were all represented.

  For Detroiters, an earlier march in June up Woodward Avenue, with King delivering an address at Cobo Hall, was the pivotal historic moment. Particularly moving was a section of King’s speech when he said, “I have a dream . . .” Sponsored by Reverend Franklin and other community leaders, a huge crowd filled the hall. The march was one of King’s first attempts to move the civil rights movement north, to point out that northern urban blacks were also denied their rights, a move that in time cost him some northern supporters. As he often did that year, King pointed out that it was the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet “The Negro in the United States of America is still not free.” It was a poignant moment in a city where blacks cheering the proclamation in 1863 led to whit
e violence. The blacks fought back in the first of several notable Detroit “race riots.” This had been the moment when the city council decided that Detroit needed a police force. In Detroit the police force was created to control African Americans.

  Gordy recorded the King speech and released it on an album titled The Great March to Freedom on Motown’s Black Forum label. This was Motown’s official recognition of support for the civil rights movement. Gordy even traveled to Atlanta to present King with a copy of the record. Gordy had decided to unabashedly tie Motown to civil rights or at least the Martin Luther King strain of it. This did not stop King from suing Motown for copyright infringement, though the suit was later dropped. The album was released on August 28, 1963, the day of the historic march on Washington, DC.

  Gordy sensed correctly that 1963 was a historic moment for the civil rights movement but miscalculated the importance of King’s rally in Detroit. Though it seemed huge in June, it was dwarfed by the press coverage of 250,000 people attending the rally in Washington in August. The key line of Gordy’s recording, the “I have a dream” passage, is always remembered from King reusing it in Washington.

  The March on Washington is a good example of how history is not so much a record of what happened as of how it was reported, and most of the established press reported it as a show of unity and a triumph for both the movement and the Kennedy administration. E. W. Kenworthy for The New York Times reported, “It was the greatest assembly for a redress of grievances that this capital has ever seen.” That may have been true, but historian Howard Zinn wrote in The Nation that, having come from the brutal reality of SNCC work in Mississippi, “I felt a certain air of unreality about the March on Washington.”