Excerpted from BUT WILL YOU LOVE ME TOMORROW?: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Group by Laura Flam & Emily Sieu Liebowitz. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
BRIAN HOLLAND, songwriter: I was with Motown before there was Motown.
JANIE BRADFORD, Motown executive: Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, and myself were the first five. We would come together at his sister Loucye’s house — Berry used to stay with her and we would go over there and write.
MARY WILSON, The Supremes: The family that ran the company — Mr. Berry Gordy’s family — were all involved and they were all females, pretty much. They were responsible for always taking care of us, because of the girls there, because of the females — it was just a consideration that came down from . . . from various families, because the women were all very progressive women. They brought their ethics into it, which was cool because most of us had parents who had the same interests and values. That’s the way it was in our neighborhood, in our Black community.
JANIE BRADFORD, Motown executive: Well, in the beginning, it was just a handful, really, in the office, so we had to do whatever had to be done. There was nobody — no money to pay a cleaning crew — so we cleaned the office. In fact, I remember several times we went out in the yard and pulled the weeds ’cause we didn’t have a mower — couldn’t pay nobody to cut the grass — but we didn’t want our place to look the worst on the block, so we did whatever was required of us.
BRIAN HOLLAND, songwriter: I started working at Motown. You know what I was making? I was making twelve dollars a week. Twelve dollars a week. Eventually, I went to seventeen dollars a week, then when we started making money, I started making twenty-five dollars a week. I was so enthused by working hard because I wanted to make money — I wanted to buy me a car, take care of my family . . . matter of fact, I had a baby at that time.
JANIE BRADFORD, Motown executive: I remember once, Holland-Dozier-Holland, after the company had progressed and they’d had several hits . . . some girl that was studying music was there listening to whatever they were playing, and she said, “Oh no, you can’t put those two notes together, that music don’t go together,” and they looked at her, they said, “How many hits have you had?”
BRIAN HOLLAND, songwriter: It was a place where you can go and achieve, you know what I mean?
MICKEY STEVENSON, Motown A&R: If you are a writer, we wouldn’t take your song. In the Brill Building, you have to give up the writing, or part of it — this, that, and the other and all that mess — I thought that was a real rip-off for Black people and talented people, but they had no place else to go. So they had to go, and I understood that — other than the Brill Building, their talent will go nowhere — at least they get a shot. . . . So they had no choice. But we didn’t play that game, and I made that real clear. That’s why I hated that place.
JANIE BRADFORD, Motown executive: There were no restrictions on talent or who presented the talent, who came up with the ideas and had the opportunity to try them — we were free to do that.
MICKEY STEVENSON, Motown A&R: So it was like a gift for all of us, you follow me? And for Black artists it was a place to go and get into the industry. Other than that, you had to go out to either New York or Chicago, or something. But as we were growing, musicians came to Motown to be heard.
MARTHA REEVES, The Vandellas: Motown was the place everybody wanted to be.
CAL GILL, The Velvelettes: And thank God for the Motown music, because that music actually encouraged diversity. Because Berry Gordy wanted to appeal to a wide range of people. He didn’t want Motown to be classified as “Black” music. He wanted to be classified as just “good” music that everybody who liked to hear music wanted to hear.
BERTHA BARBEE, The Velvelettes: The migration of African Americans — a lot of people migrated and they moved up to the North to get better jobs. Of course, Flint and Detroit had the factories — the Ford Company, Chevrolet and Buick and GM.
I love that whole history of Black music — where it came from — all of that mixed in together. I think that Detroit, Flint, Chicago, that music — yeah, it’s there — but the influence came from down South.
So, you intertwined those and, Lord, I do know what I’m talking about with this piano thing, with the chords — you add a jazz seventh chord to this music, or it might have been a spiritual, you might make it a little faster — that’s where gospel sort of came into play. And I think that’s all part of Motown, you know what I mean? They mixed it all together — I call it sort of mixed in a pot, or something, and you stirred it all up together and it just came out with that beautiful . . . that sound that we hear.
MARTHA REEVES, The Vandellas: I’m from Eufaula, Alabama, and we grew up here in the city. We went south every summer when school was out while my dad worked in different places.
JANIE BRADFORD, Motown executive: Very few were born and raised in Detroit; they were born somewhere else — then raised in Detroit. So I think it was just a collection of people with various talents coming together and that was a release being able to let it out.
CAL GILL, The Velvelettes: My mother is from Mississippi. She didn’t like the blues because she said the blues were depressing to her. She said . . . because she once told us, “I am the blues.”
MARTHA REEVES, The Vandellas: Remember, we were collected too. Berry had producers and arrangers, headed by William Stevenson. They went from club to club, and house to house, and gathered those great musicians, and gathered the singers, and brought them to Hitsville USA.
BOBBY JAY, disc jockey: Berry decided to put together, you know, a permanent group of jazz musicians, the Funk Brothers, to play on all the records. It was more structured . . . it was more based on the assembly-line concept in Detroit. So it became, as Berry coined it, “the sound of young America.”
BERTHA BARBEE, The Velvelettes: The Detroit sound . . . because Mickey Stevenson, who headed up their A&R at the time, where did they get the Funk Brothers? Got them from the clubs when Berry Gordy wanted musicians for his newly started recording studio. They got them from the clubs, you know what I mean?
JACKIE HICKS, The Andantes: You were there every day, it was like a little factory where you were just having fun, you enjoyed your job. You sat around, if there was nothing to do, as soon as you get up to leave, “Well, come on, we got this song here for such-and-such a group and we want to sing, you guys just sing on that.” We practically lived up there.
LOUVAIN DEMPS, The Andantes: Stomping on boards and all kinds of stuff.
JACKIE HICKS, The Andantes: We had hand clappers and foot stompers . . . you couldn’t flush the toilet because, in certain rooms, in certain times, it would come back on the tape — you would hear it.
CAL GILL, The Velvelettes: Berry Gordy was only in his thirties when he founded his Motown, or late twenties. So he was learning to . . . you know, he didn’t have all the answers to everything.
BERTHA BARBEE, The Velvelettes: We signed in 1962. So we would see Pop Gordy, which was Berry Gordy’s father. He was a carpenter and knew what he was doing. He was nailing . . . we’d see him some days nailing up mirrors in these little practice rooms — they’d call them practice rooms, where we could do our steps, and they’d have each of the rooms and then mirrors.
MARTHA REEVES, The Vandellas: It’s a lot of people that were there working as a team. It sort of favored a factory kind of routine, like an assembly line — because the hits were coming so fast, and the artists were being so successful.
JACKIE HICKS, The Andantes: Every day, every week type thing — like when . . . when I say it was like a factory putting out cars — that’s exactly what it was.
PETER BENJAMINSON, Florence Ballard’s biographer: Berry worked in an assembly line, which is where he got the idea for how to produce records. Basically, the record moved from one department to another, right up the line.
BERTHA BARBEE, The Velvelettes: We would be the “car,” so to speak, when we signed our contract.
MARTHA REEVES, The Vandellas: It was Berry Gordy’s house. He invited his friends in.
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