This Day in Pop Music History (Berry Gordy Jr. Founds Motown)

January 12, 1959—Using an $800 loan from his family, feisty 29-year-old former boxer and fledgling record producer-composer Berry Gordy Jr. established Motown Records, the first record label owned by and starring African-Americans that achieved success with white audiences.

I chose the headline for this post, referring to “pop music” rather than “R&B” or “soul,” because that’s how Gordy would prefer it. In a recent Vanity Fair oral history of his company, the legendary Detroit music entrepreneur related how he convinced radio stations with predominantly white listeners to play his firm’s music. What he was peddling, he insisted, was “popular,” not the more limiting labels, usually race-tinged, that they ascribed to it.

You know what? Gordy was right. The songs created at “Studio A” in the two-story building on 2648 West Grand Boulevard have become an indelible part of American music, played over and over again the world over, just as surely as those by the Gershwins, Porter, and other masters of the Great American Songbook.

Gordy even got his singers to mix in songs by white composers to supplement those crafted by dear friend Smokey Robinson and other tunesmith who created “Hitsville U.S.A.”: The Four Tops, for instance, covered my favorite Jimmy Webb song, “MacArthur Park,” and the label’s top female group, the Supremes, sang the Bernstein-Sondheim song “Somewhere” from West Side Story.

More than 50 books have been written about the Motown creative community, including by Gordy himself and singer Martha Reeves. But I think that to really understand what Motown meant to America and what life was like within the organization, two types of literature should be read:

* A social and cultural history that, sifting carefully through both the most banal celebrity bios and the most turgid government hearings, nevertheless provides a vividly impressionistic sense of a unique time and place. Let me be more specific about the model I have in mind: the late Otto Friedrich’s thrilling portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, City of Nets. (I understand that his similar histories of Weimar Germany and Paris in the Age of Manet are equally good, but this is the one I can recommend, having read it.) Is there such a book about Motown? If any readers know of any, please let me know.

* Legal documents, from lawsuits and investigations. I prefer to keep my associations with attorneys on a personal rather than professional level. Witnesses have lied through their teeth and evidence is not always the way it’s portrayed. In short, I’m frequently of the opinion that the Keanu Reeves-Al Pacino film The Devil’s Advocate verges at times on being a documentary rather than a work of fiction.

Nevertheless, legal documents can yield a basic stratum of fact that often can’t be gainsaid. Though Motown had elements of a family, as claimed in the Vanity Fair piece, it was ultimately a corporation. The elemental truths of this fact can be glimpsed in some of the civil actions in which it’s figured over the years, including Martha Reeves’ suit for 14 years’ worth of lost royalties; Marvin Gaye’s bitter divorce from Gordy’s sister Anna; and Teena Marie’s attempt to break a contract signed as a minor without benefit of legal counsel.

Motown’s corporate status also explains why Gordy, like many white business leaders of the period, moved to the Sunbelt, despite the visible pride and the economic benefits it brought the city, in 1971. So much of the move to Los Angeles was motivated by the music leader’s desire to achieve a Hollywood film career for then-paramour Diana Ross. God knows, as Detroit continued to hemorrhage over the following three decades after his departure, the city could have used Hitsville, U.S.A.