Why Motown still has us dancing in the street ... Remembering the development of colour blind music 

HISTORY  

Motown: The Sound Of Young America

by Adam White, Barney Ales

(Thames & Hudson £39.95)

Today's popular music is colour blind. We don't wonder about the ethnicity of a singer when we hear a song we like. It really doesn't matter.

Looking back, it's astonishing to remember how recent a development that is, particularly in the U.S., where, until the late Fifties, the record charts were segregated into black rhythm-and-blues and white pop lists.

Today's popular music is colour blind. We don't wonder about the ethnicity of a singer when we hear a song

As Smokey Robinson of The Miracles would say: 'If you were a black artist you could be singing Tiddlywinks and it was still a black rhythm-and-blues record. If you were white and sang the same song, it was pop.'

Your colour dictated which radio stations would play your record. And such prejudice did not apply only in the southern U.S. states, where racism was institutionalised.

In the early Sixties, even in the northern city of Detroit, Michigan, a young black man called Berry Gordy would have to call ahead to a new restaurant to inquire as to whether it 'served coloured people'.

Gordy wasn't going to be stopped by racism. He wanted to make records and 'sell music to all the people - white or black, Jews or gentiles, cops and robbers'.

And he would succeed so spectacularly that the record company he created, Motown, would, I believe, become one of the wrecking balls that helped smash a path through all kinds of racial barriers in the second half of the 20th century.

Gordy was working on a car assembly line in a Detroit factory when he decided to set up his own record label. It was 1959 and he was 29.

Having co-written the hit Reet Petite for Jackie Wilson and You Got What It Takes for his friend Marv Johnson, for which he had received a pittance, he realised the prizes went to those who owned the means of production - the writing, recording, publishing, pressing and selling of the records.

Gordy knew that for real success he had to get his records played by white DJs for a white audience as well as a black one. So, stream- lining his company like a car production line, he set two teams to work. The songwriters, singers and musicians were all black, while the promotion and distribution people were nearly all white.

It was business, and Gordy, though a handy boogie-woogie player and gifted at spotting talent, was a businessman.

He was shrewd, too. When untrue rumours got around that his business may have Mafia connections, he didn't deny them.

Why? Because, he would laugh, it meant the middle men distributors would pay Motown a lot quicker should they think they may get an unwelcome visit if they didn't.

Success came quickly with the all-girl group The Marvelettes and their hit Please Mr Postman while Smokey Robinson's music lessons in high school eventually led him and The Miracles to Gordy with Shop Around.

And then there was Mary Wells with the classic, million-selling My Guy. Poor Mary! She made the mistake of believing it was her voice that made her a star when actually it was the songs that Robinson wrote for her.

Leaving Motown in 1965, she never had another hit, while Robinson soon came up with a companion song for another Motown act, The Temptations - My Girl. And there would be many more.

The record-buying teen-agers loved the records that Motown was putting out. As Gordy boasted, his label was 'the sound of young America'. It was.

Motown's success had been almost exclusively in the U.S., then Gordy got lucky when The Beatles chose to cover three Motown songs for their second album: You've Really Got A Hold On Me, Money and Please Mr Postman.

All Gordy needed now was glamour, and up popped Diana Ross and the Supremes with Where Did Our Love Go? and Baby Love.

From a tiny company where acts were recorded in a converted garage, Motown had mushroomed to become the biggest black-owned entertainment company in the U.S., with The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5 and Marvin Gaye following each other up the charts.

By the Seventies, however, Gordy was looking towards Hollywood as he steered his protege (and lover) Diana Ross to movie stardom with Lady Sings The Blues.

He finally moved his entire company to Los Angeles. Though Stevie Wonder albums still sold well, an era was over.

In 1988, Gordy sold the label for $61 million. It was a bargain, and the company was resold five years later for $301 million.

He kept the publishing side of the business until 1997, when it went for $320 million for 15,000 songs.

This is a beautifully illustrated and informative book, but as it is co-written by Barney Ales, the man who sold the records, rather than Gordy, the man who made them, the emphasis is on business rather than art.

I would like to have learned more about what went on in the hothouse of creativity that was Motown at its zenith, about who came up with the ideas for songs and arrangements and to know a little bit about the rivalries, jealousies and scandals that must inevitably have lurked in the background.

For that, I may have to wait for a different kind of book.