Motown Records, Founded on This Day in 1959, Broke Racial Barriers in Pop Music With Its Beloved Hits

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.”

Motown did not have a black supremacist message or attitude. Indeed, seen in full, Motown is a conservative strain in the creative amalgamation of styles and themes in modern American popular music in its golden era and at its best today.

Despite criticism in the black community, whites held significant positions in Motown based on merit. Motown's black musical talents were taught to dress and conduct themselves with dignity and good manners. This approach was essential to Motown's artistic and commercial success based on the strategy of founder Berry Gordy to appeal across racial lines.

This was not always an easy sell to Motown's artists. For example, with Detroit black working class backgrounds, The Supremes resisted Motown's charm school and being made to sing, act, and dress "white." Although capable singers as individuals, The Supremes required considerable time and effort to develop as an act and to get the hits that made them a popular sensation.

No small part of the success of The Supremes was that, in accord with Motown's rules, they were required to be always well-dressed, well-mannered, and well-behaved. Their songs were also lyrically clear and comprehensible, being about love, loss, and romantic yearnings, the great themes of popular music. The Motown singing style was not identifiable as black or white. Motown was in the middle ground of American popular culture, more Beach Boys than rebellious rock and roll.

In contrast, The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who, -- Brits, of course -- and American rock acts were long-haired, often scruffy and surly, and given to frequent alcohol and drug references in their music. Motown singers though who took up drugs or consumed alcohol to excess or became obnoxious or self-destructive were subject to suspension or removal.

Bad conduct by rockers though often enhanced their appeal even as it could destroy them as individuals. The wild streak in Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain and others that made them into dead rock gods was and is a core part of rock and roll.

Correctly understood, Motown expressed the desire of black artists and music business executives and the black community in general to succeed by assimilating into America's cultural and economic mainstream. Rock and roll instead broadly appealed to generational rebellion by white teens against their parents. Call me deluded, but I see both as legitimate and entertaining but with Motown as the more conservative side of that cultural equation.

I am a Boomer and get your attitude. The boomer generation though is more complicated than you suppose.

We were raised in relative affluence and better educated than prior generations -- but confronted as teens with the racial agitation of the Sixties, a badly run war in Vietnam, and the perplexing cultural discontinuities of birth control and the ensuing sexual revolution.

Similar eras of change in the past eventually sorted themselves out, with embarrassments glossed over or conveniently forgotten. And ensuing generations get to deliver judgment on their Boomer parents and grandparents and then try to do better.

“the stinking counter-culture 60s hippies”

I’m a “stupid vacuous” boomer, so I was there. I don’t recall he hippie counter-culture being at all involved in Motown; they had their own weird set of “artists”. Dylan, Baez, Joplin ... all disheveled smelly no-talent screamers.

Motown artists were well put-together, neat and clean, with actual music containing ... gasp! ... harmony.

When hippies were listening to their stuff, we preachers’ kids were listening to Motown. There was a huge difference.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.