Posted on 01/12/2025 2:56:24 PM PST by nickcarraway
Berry Gordy’s record label used the ‘sound of young America’ to bring people together
On January 12, 1959, Berry Gordy Jr. started Tamla Records with the help of an $800 loan from his family, starting a journey that would forever change the music industry. The following year, it merged into Motown Record Corporation.
For Gordy, starting his own label was the product of a longtime love of music. When he returned from Army service in 1953, he opened a short-lived record store in Detroit. Later, to amuse himself on the Ford assembly line, Gordy would make up songs. Eventually, he found himself writing for singer Jackie Wilson and helping young singer William “Smokey” Robinson and his band, best known as the Miracles, sell records.
The limited returns—one royalty check Gordy received is said to have been for just $3.19—are part of what motivated him to start Motown. “Back in those days, especially if you were Black, nobody was paying you what you should be paid, if they paid you at all. So Berry decided to start his own record company and gave us that outlet,” Robinson told AARP Magazine in 2018.
In an industry dominated by just a handful of major labels, success was no small feat. The industry tended to market music by Black artists—usually all lumped under the umbrella of “rhythm and blues”—solely to Black audiences. Those R&B tunes often only reached a white audience if a white artist like Pat Boone or Elvis Presley decided to cover them.
To succeed, Gordy needed to appeal to the majority-Black R&B market and the broader, majority-white “pop” audience. Indeed, an early analysis of Motown’s success from Fortune magazine credits Gordy’s financial success to his ability to attract talented Black artists and “recognize those tunes, lyrics and audio effects” that would appeal to Black and white listeners alike.
In addition to creating songs with mass appeal, Gordy focused on marketing to white audiences, including hiring white marketers to use their connections in the industry. Sometimes, he avoided putting musicians on album covers so they wouldn’t be immediately discounted because of their race.
Motown’s first album was Hi… We’re the Miracles, released in 1961. The album included “Shop Around,” Motown’s first single to sell more than a million copies.
The label quickly hit its stride. Motown songs kept up with tunes by bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and earworms from groups like the Supremes helped Motown sell more 45s than any other company in the nation. By 1971, it had put out 110 Billboard Top 10 hits.
The integration of Motown’s acts into the upper echelons of the pop charts had a ripple effect, leading groups like the Supremes to be invited to play clubs with predominantly white audiences. They weren’t always welcomed with open arms: Several Motown artists, including the Contours’ Joe Billingslea, have recounted the racism they experienced while touring.
Gordy was hesitant to let artists try to send a message with their music. For example, he initially vetoed Marvin Gaye’s incredibly successful 1971 album What’s Going On because it talked about social and political issues. He only relented when Gaye threatened never to work with him again.
“I never wanted Motown to be a mouthpiece for civil rights,” he told TIME in 2020. Instead, he saw the label as an example of a successful Black business and a force for integration through music. Still, Gordy and Motown took an active role in civil rights history by recording Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, unknowingly creating an important archive of the now-famous address.
“I saw Motown much like the world [King] was fighting for—people of all races and religions, working together harmoniously for a common goal,” Gordy told TIME. Gordy later sold the label, but its beginning and golden era left a profound mark on history.
“Our music made you feel good, but we also had a message of equality,” Martha Reeves, of Motown’s Martha and the Vandellas, told NPR in 2011. “It's just the sound of young America.”
Not all of us like Taylor Swift, Madonna, and Rage Against the Machine like you do.
Black people covered the Irish with their tap dancing. Black people covered the Episcopalians and Baptists with their spirituals. So what? Why is the Smithsonian doing neo-Marxist, collectivist identity politics?
Thanks to the Democrats dysfunctional mismanagement of Detroit, Motown fled the city in 1972.
I never was much into music, I have only bought one or two albums in my life. I just listen to what’s on the radio, whatever it is. I’m glad you have a hobby.
As for myself I’ve always been into reading books.
Motown succeeded because its music was written and performed by talented blacks but was geared to Americans without regard to race and without drug influence and messaging.
I am not saying it isn’t good music, I just don’t care for labeling artist by their race. Enjoy Motown all you want but I’m not going to toe the black supremacist line like boomers do.
I’m trying to help move the ‘Overton window’ back to where it should be.
I’m tired of Black History Month, gay pride month, transvestites and their sex slave month, etc. I’m just done with it.
I remember Miles Davis taking a lot of flak from fellow blacks for having Bill Evans playing on his “Kind Of Blue” album.
Stop putting “black history month” and “black” in the same category with sex-themed months. It’s not the same thing.
The U.S. also recognizes “heritage/history months” for other ethnic groups, too, such as French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish.
Note that by his own admission, he's only owned 2 music albums in his life, has no idea what Motown is ("before my time"), yet joyfully wallows in his utter ignorance by blasting his diarrhea all over a thread about Motown.
If there's a leftwing version of Libs Of TokTok who monitors conservative sites like FR, looking for quotes to smear EVERYone right of center, this twit is providing them with WAY more ammo than they need, all by himself.
You nailed it! I love Motown music bought over a dozen albums and 45s by the Supremes, Four Tops, Miracles, Marvin Gaye, etc. back in the ‘60s.
So in your brilliant opinion, the very generation that put the MOST effort into the elimination of racism and racial barriers is responsible
FOR BLACK SUPREMACISM?
Did your mother have any children that retained ANY possibility of rational thought after birth?
FOR BLACK SUPREMACISM?"
That wasn't your generation, that was your parents, the greatest generation. The spoiled boomers who have such a delusionary high sense of self-satisfaction, took racial equality and made a race cult that evolved into an oppressive totalitarian racial spoils system.
That is an epic list! Wow!
Paralleling the rise of Motown was CKLW, a super powerful AM radio station in Windsor, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit.
They played music and didn’t care about skin color. They introduced black music from Motown and others to a largely white colorblind audience. And that audience was massive. Because of their powerful signal, CKLW beamed over much of Canada and the US. At one point, CKLW was the number one rated station is something like eight states and five provinces.
Motown and CKLW!
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