Quote of the Day (Martha Reeves, on Motown)

“You can’t really have a good house party unless you play some Motown.”—Singer Martha Reeves, quoted by Lisa Robinson, “It Happened in Hitsville,” Vanity Fair, December 2008

(Check out Lisa Robinson’s new oral history of Motown in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, now on the newsstands. Fifty years before Barack Obama, Berry Gordy Jr. founded an organization that, at a time when America badly needed it, managed to bring blacks and whites together. Yes, it was only on the dance floor, but it was as good a place to start as any—and, at a time now in the music industry when everything is hopelessly demographically segmented, this is not something to dismiss.)