That someone turned out to be the radio—and the family piano. After listening to performers like Hazel Scott (wife of Harlem’s evocative congressman Adam Clayton Powell) play boogie-woogie on the radio, he would sit down at the baby grand in the living room and try to repeat what he had heard. He became good enough at it that later he would reach the semifinals of bandleader Frankie Carle’s Boogie-Woogie contest at the Michigan Theater.
The family piano’s role in the music that flowed out of the residential streets of Detroit cannot be overstated. The piano, and its availability to children of the black working class and middle class, is essential to understanding what happened in that time and place, and why it happened, not just with Berry Gordy Jr. but with so many other young black musicians who came of age there from the late forties to the early sixties. What was special then about pianos and Detroit? First, because of the auto plants and related industries, most Detroiters had steady salaries and families enjoyed a measure of disposable income they could use to listen to music in clubs and at home. Second, the economic geography of the city meant that the vast majority of residents lived in single-family houses, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them. And third, Detroit had the egalitarian advantage of a remarkable piano enterprise, the Grinnell Brothers Music House.
Founded in Ann Arbor nearly a hundred years earlier by the brothers Ira, Clayton, and Herbert, Grinnell’s was not just the dominant music store in Detroit but the largest retail music emporium in the nation, as well as a prolific manufacturer of pianos. Its headquarters (designed, to be sure, by Albert Kahn) was down the block on Woodward from the J. L. Hudson Company, Detroit’s largest department store, and in its own realm it had the same bountiful feel as Hudson’s, evoking the good times of the city—customers and sales staff everywhere, floor after floor of glistening merchandise. By late 1962 Grinnell’s was so popular that it was finalizing plans to extend into five floors in the Saunders Building next door. The expansion denoted the confluence of art and finance, where Detroit’s love of music met a powerful belief in the downtown’s economic viability.
If you were a youngster interested in music in Detroit, you knew Grinnell’s and probably spent time there. David Williams, whose uncle Randolph Wallace operated the Garfield Lounge and Randora Hotel on the John R strip, famous for its Monday night twenty-nine-cent chicken-in-a-basket dinners, spent the Saturday mornings of his youth catching the city bus outside his family house on West Grand and riding it down to Grinnell’s for a forty-five-minute clarinet lesson. Looking back on Grinnell’s fifty years later from his office in another music city, Nashville, as Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor for university affairs and athletics, Williams remembered a full floor of rehearsal rooms, all soundproofed, with music stands and encouraging teachers offering individual lessons in clarinet, trumpet, trombone, saxophone, flute, guitar, and most of all piano. Music was the soul of the city, Williams recalled, and “the pride of a family was to have a piano.”
What defined Grinnell’s was its connection to the community, another Detroit trademark. Hudson’s was a mixed bag in that regard. It was known for its uncommonly generous returns policy and for making quality goods affordable to the working class, but it was also segregated in the sense that it had no blacks on its sales staff. Grinnell’s, which hired some black musicians and piano tuners, provided pianos and other instruments to people of all races and incomes, offering a variety of flexible rental and purchase plans. It also supplied instruments to the city schools (in Detroit elementary schools alone, more than twelve thousand students were in instrumental music classes), hosted recitals at its downtown store, and sponsored piano music festivals in the city and state. “Grinnell’s had this thing where you could take lessons down at the store on Woodward, but the other thing you could do is buy a piano on time, on layaway,” noted Dan Aldridge, a historian of Detroit’s black culture. “So you have all these working-class families in Detroit who had their own piano. It was because of Grinnell’s.”
The Gordy family was among Detroit’s piano multitudes. In 1949, when Berry Jr. was twenty, Color magazine published a feature story titled “America’s Most Amazing Family” that showed the entire Gordy clan—Pops and Mom, all eight siblings, and a few grandchildren by then—gathered around a baby grand piano at the family residence at 5139 St. Antoine. “If there were a national contest to select the most gifted family in America, the editors of Color would nominate the Gordy family,” the article asserted. The story extolled the family’s entrepreneurial genius and diverse talents, including a prizewinning bowling team composed of the four brothers (led by Fuller, who was perhaps the city’s best kegler), and an equestrian Bit and Spur Riding Club involving the sisters and founded by Loucye, who among other skills was a riding instructor. Berry Jr. was described as “the musician in the family . . . who provides the music for frequent family song sessions in the Gordy home.”
Berry was so obsessed with music that he could play a piano in his mind if need be, or some version of one. In his late twenties he found himself working on an assembly line out at Ford. In the decade since he had dropped out of Northeastern High, he had married and become a father; he had tried to emulate his childhood hero, Joe Louis, as a boxer (although far down in skill and class, a 113-pound featherweight instead of a heavyweight); he had served in Korea as a draftee driving a chaplain’s jeep; and he had failed in his first efforts as a businessman. Esther’s only half-joking refrain hit home: “Well, if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” Now he just needed a steady income, and his mother-in-law, with her union connections, landed him the auto job. It had taken him only one day laboring in the foundry to reinforce the notion that he was not like his father. “I was taking hot metals as they came out of the thing and it was burning my hand even though I had asbestos gloves and all that stuff, so I figured with my piano playing and my music, you know I just couldn’t. After one day of work I . . . went home and told my wife [Thelma Coleman Gordy], ‘I can’t do this.’ There were such loud noises I couldn’t hear anything. And of course she was very upset with me. I couldn’t lose a job. Her mother got the job for me.” Rather than allow him to quit altogether, his mother-in-law found another job for him three weeks later at the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line, and that is where he developed the piano of his imagination.
His sequence on the line involved upholstery: snapping a metal clamp into place. Once he mastered it, he realized that he could gain four or five free minutes for every minute of work by moving his way up the assembly rather than waiting for the line to reach his station. It was unorthodox and against union and floor procedures, but he went about it with such enthusiasm that his fellow workers seldom complained. “They didn’t really like it but I was overly nice. Overly nice,” he said. “I would do my job . . . and I was overly fast. When somebody was working on the back of the car I would jump in that car, and then go up to the next person, ‘Excuse me.’ I was not supposed to be up there. Then I would go back and as the cars moved up the line I had three or four already done. Then I would go to my tunes.” As the tunes popped out of his head he wrote them down in a notebook he stashed in his back pocket, using the most basic method of musical notation, simpler than anything he had learned from Uncle Burton. As melodic lines came to him, he remembered them by giving each note a number, like an eight-year-old following the numbers on a toy piano or xylophone. His baseline was “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—3212333—and he went from there, composing one love song after another.
Later much would be made of the idea that the music-making process at Motown was inspired by Gordy’s experience on the automobile assembly line, a notion he himself promoted, despite the possibly negative connotations of mass-producing art. In many ways the parallels were obvious; the Motown operation on West Grand did in fact have a bit of the Rouge plant concept to it, taking raw materials and turning them into finished commercial products one sequence at a time, evoking a brand through a sound as ide
ntifiable if not as repetitious as a fleet of Ford Galaxies. But the less noted and more important point about Gordy’s transference of his auto plant experience to his later success at the music studio involved not the rote of it all but the opposite: the improvisational freedom he developed on the assembly line and repeated at Motown. It was while snapping clasps on Mercury upholstery that he figured out some essential components of creative work: how to shape time and circumstances to his advantage rather than be a slave to them and how to accomplish what was needed while also doing what he wanted.
His first job making money from music, or trying to, came before the auto job, when he ran a record store, the 3-D Record Mart, specializing in jazz. Detroit had been a noted jazz town, black and white, since the twenties, when Jean Goldkette’s famed orchestra brought the Dorsey brothers and Bix Beiderbecke to town. After the war, the jazz clubs, led by the Blue Bird Inn, with its bright indigo blue exterior, featured homegrown Milt Jackson on vibes and the Jones brothers: Hank, the pianist, Thad, the trumpeter, and the sublime Elvin, who later played drums in the John Coltrane quartet. Paul Chambers and Ron Carter, two of the premier double-bass men in modern jazz, both got their musical training at Cass Tech. The drummer Louis Hayes, pianists Barry Harris and Tommy Flanagan, trumpeter Howard McGhee, saxophonists Lucky Thompson and Yusef Lateef, guitarist Kenny Burrell—all came out of Detroit. To love jazz was to be cool in the world of Gordy and his east side contemporaries, but soon enough he confronted the reality that jazz was too cool for business; not enough customers were buying records at his shop. “I was trying to force jazz on these people, telling them how talented Duke Ellington was, and Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Sonny Stitt, all these people, the jazz and bebop. I wanted to educate my people. And they all wanted the blues. ‘You got anything by Muddy Waters? You got any of this blues, that blues?’ And I would say, ‘Look, I don’t sell that stuff.’ ” His refusal to “sell that stuff” led to the shuttering of the store in bankruptcy.
Like his parents and siblings, Gordy had an entrepreneur’s sensibility. Failure was not an end but a lesson. Music was his passion, and so was selling, but trying to sell something that people didn’t want was not just futile; it was restricting. “Music was in my soul. I heard gospel, I loved gospel. The blues was in my soul, but I never had permission to love it because it was not what the young hip people were doing. None of the young hip people I knew were into the blues. Blues was for old people. And they have their whiskey and their stuff like that. But after going out of business because people wanted the blues, I wanted to find out why. After that happened, I started to realize, wait a minute, blues is not a lower class of music than jazz, it’s just a different kind. And these people in Detroit, which was kind of like a southern town, they were home folk. They worked all week and they wanted to talk about their joys and their pain. Especially the pain. And so they would listen to the real music that told them about their pain, and how they felt.” The songs Gordy wrote and championed, starting with the tunes he composed on the assembly line, followed that idea: clear story lines, basic and universal, music for all people, focusing on love and heartbreak, work and play, joy and pain.
The transition from anonymous assembly-line balladeer to Motown impresario was accomplished with crucial assistance from his sisters. The first boost came from Gwen and Anna, who, in keeping with the family’s enterprising nature, ran the cigarette and photo concession at the Flame Show Bar, Detroit’s top black nightclub, at the corner of John R and Canfield down from the Gotham Hotel, along a stretch known alternately as “the strip” and “Little Vegas” and “the street of music.” From his days as a boxer, little Berry had stood tall in Anna’s and Gwen’s eyes. They attended his bouts, nurtured his dreams, believed in him “one hundred percent,” and shared his love of music and ambition to achieve something special.
In the fire song of Detroit—with the Chesterfield Lounge, the Garfield Lounge, the 20 Grand and its Driftwood Lounge, the Grand Bar, the Blue Bird Inn, Club El Sino, the Music Bar, and the Frolic Bar, among others—the Flame Show Bar burned brightest through the fifties. Its owner, Morris Wasserman, was Jewish. (The connective roots between Jews and blacks went deep in the city, intertwining music, shopkeeping, education, housing, civil rights, even the mob, going back to the Prohibition days of the Purple Gang of Jewish mobsters and their black policy or numbers men.) The Flame’s clientele was a mix of hip blacks and whites. Billie Holiday, Della Reese, Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, Etta James, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Sam Cooke, B. B. King, T-Bone Walker, Solomon Burke—blues stars were booked there one after another. One of Gordy’s prized lifetime possessions was a photograph his sisters had taken of him posing at the Flame with Billie Holiday during a break in her performance there in May 1957, two years before she died in a Manhattan hospital bed at age forty-four, drug-addled, diseased, and lonely. At the Flame that night, Gordy recalled, “she was sitting over there, and I said ‘I gotta meet Billie Holiday ’cause I love her.’ And they [his sisters] said, ‘Go over there, she is really nice.’ She said, ‘Come on baby, come on over here, baby.’ And I wanted a photo taken and I had some friends with me, ‘Can they be in it, too?’ ‘Sure, baby, whatever you want.’ And she was so sweet to me. So sweet.”
Inside the Flame, the night scene was bathed in mirrored reflections of emerald and gold, ruby red and deep satin blue, splendor dark and smoky, everything exotic, hypnotizing, enthralling to Gordy. John White and the gamblers from the Gotham were regulars on weeknights, along with high-end pimps and prostitutes. The stage was at shoulder level, behind a flickering bar that stretched thirty yards. Lawyers, doctors, writers, other musicians, visiting athletes, and businessmen waited on weekend nights to land some of the 250 choice seats. The women, including Berry’s sisters, invariably were sharply dressed in well-fitted gowns. “The Flame Show Bar, that was a beautiful thing,” Gordy recalled. “To see women dressed in beautiful clothes and stuff like that, and I was in awe of the people that came in there. The men were dapper, and by then I was dapper too.” He entered that world with his hair processed and threads that Gwen and Anna said made him look like a five-foot-five-and-a-half-inch pimp.
The sisters introduced him around. Here was Maurice King, leader of the club’s house band, the Wolverines. There was Roquel Billy Davis, a songwriter. Up onstage was Ziggy Johnson, the master of ceremonies, a short and spry dance maestro who concocted the steps for the Chick-a-Boom, the Satin, and the Soft. Ziggy knew everyone. You had arrived when he put your name in bold print in his club scene gossip column, “Zagging with Ziggy,” in the Michigan Chronicle. Here was Al Green, manager of Jackie Wilson and operator of a local music publishing company. There was Mr. Excitement himself, performing two nights on the same bill with Lady Day. And over there was young Nat Tarnopol, who worked with Green. Some of the makings of Gordy’s future right there. King would become director of artistic development at Motown. Davis would write some early songs with him. Ziggy would publicize Motown at every stage. And Green and then Tarnopol (after Green died prematurely) would pave the way for Gordy to write big hits for the electric, sweet-singing, pompadoured Wilson, including “Reet Petite,” “To Be Loved,” and “Lonely Teardrops.”
• • •
The loan that helped fund Motown was not an informal oral agreement, not in the entrepreneurial Gordy family. It was a written document, signed on June 12, 1959, with a payback date of June 12, 1961. The loan note form came from the Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Detroit, but that institution was crossed out and Ber-Berry Co-op was inked over it in neat block lettering. That is where the $800 came from; Ber-Berry was the family fund, a money pool into which all blood relatives and their spouses contributed ten dollars a month. Ber for Bertha, Berry for Senior—matriarch and patriarch. The parents and all eight brothers and sisters had a vote on when and how loans could be distributed. Anna and Gwen were always supportive of their little brother, but Esther’s vote was most important. Sua, big sister, w
as president of the co-op. She was the hardest to persuade, but finally relented. The interest rate was 6 percent.
The fourth sister, Loucye, also played an essential role in Motown’s evolution. The Gordy sisters as a quartet were undervalued by history, and Loucye most keenly, perhaps because she died first, of brain cancer at age forty-one in 1965, when the record company was at its zenith. Years earlier, before West Grand Boulevard, she offered her brother lodging and logistics. The genesis of what became Motown began in the basement of her house on Hague Street, where Berry was staying after his divorce from Thelma. It was there that the original team operated. The First Five, they called themselves: Smokey Robinson, Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, Janie Bradford, and Raymona (Ray) Liles (who would become Gordy’s second wife). They had coalesced around Gordy between 1957 and 1959, a period when he broke off from Jackie Wilson and his management group and decided that he had to have his own record company and publishing arm to avoid being shortchanged on royalties. The First Five was there at the creation and there when the move was made to West Grand. Loucye took on the role of publisher, heading up Jobete Music. Smokey, Bateman, and Holland wrote and sang. Janie Bradford was the first secretary, and more.
Bradford had arrived in Detroit from St. Louis as a teenager to live with her older sister, Clea, a singer recording with Chess Records and a close friend of Jackie Wilson. She considered herself a writer, a spoken-word poet long before that became a genre, and was not intimidated by Gordy. Her first words to him were “If you can write a song, I can write a better song than you any day.” Not quite true, but reflective of her self-confidence and desire. When she showed him a notebook of poems she had written, he taught her the difference between verse and lyrics. You need the hook and the song structure, he told her, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You gotta do it like a story. The lesson was made clear when he incorporated lines from two of her poems in the lyrics of songs on Jackie Wilson’s Lonely Teardrops album, “The Joke (Is Not on Me)” and “We Have Love,” though Bradford’s name inadvertently was left off the credits for “We Have Love,” a not infrequent occurrence in those early days.
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