‘I wanted to sell all music to all people: whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, cops and robbers’: A remarkable new book reveals how Motown conquered the world
Hot on the heels of a new West End musical, a brilliant new book – featuring rare images of The Jackson 5, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and more – joyously evokes the sights and sounds of that…
‘I wanted to sell all music to all people: whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, cops and robbers,’ says songwriter and former amateur boxer Berry Gordy who, aged just 29, launched his own record company in January 1959 with $800 from his family’s savings fund.
Yet by the mid-Sixties, Motown was on its way to becoming America’s largest black-owned business, with a stable of artists including The Miracles, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Martha & the Vandellas, The Four Tops and The Supremes.
Gordy was renowned for the strict work ethic he brought to Motown, evolving a musical production line that mirrored the Detroit car factories in which he had once worked.
Across the front of the record company’s first building was painted a simple declaration: ‘Hitsville USA’.
Motown’s music-makers were taught that a record must seize attention.
Gordy even conducted focus groups of teenagers to ask if they would buy a particular Motown 45 or a hot dog.
Championed by The Beatles and Dusty Springfield, Motown became a sensation in the Sixties and grew through the Seventies and Eighties, as its stars were joined by The Jackson 5, Lionel Richie and Rick James.
Their astonishing stories, alongside these rare photos from the Motown archive, have been collected in a definitive new book which reveals the epic struggle to establish this revolutionary
This book is 400 pages and contains few photos of the Jackson 5.
SOURCE: DailyMail & Thames & Hudson
