White clarinetist Benny Goodman began touring with an integrated group of musicians. Black and white kids were dancing to the big band anthems of African American composers like Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, and Count Basie. Then, in the 1920s jazz started to stir the pot. There were some Black-owned imprints like Black Swan and Black Patti, which released so-called race records-music by and for African Americans-providing a platform for artists of color. Up until the early 20th century, the options for Black recording artists were limited. I wanted everybody to enjoy my music,” Gordy told The Telegraph in 2016. “I wanted songs for the whites, Blacks, the Jews, Gentiles. But of the four rivals, Motown was the only fully Black-owned operation, and though critics accused the recording company of watering down Black music and sanitizing lyrics to bolster the bottom line, Gordy saw nothing to apologize for in his ambitions. Stax Records, in Memphis, was home to a grittier, Blacker sound, embodied by Otis Redding and Sam & Dave. Chess, headquartered in Chicago, and New York’s Atlantic Records boasted a murderer’s row of rock & roll poets, blues rebels, and R&B immortals. Motown had good company in its quest to promote African American music.
As a Black man and president of a record company, Gordy experienced not only prejudice and discrimination, but disbelief: “When I went to the white radio stations to get records played, they would laugh at me,” he recalled in a 2008 Vanity Fair interview. So was the Voting Rights Act, which ended racist southern laws preventing African Americans from casting their ballots. The Civil Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination was years away. At the time when Gordy hung out his shingle, the nation, still largely segregated, offered few opportunities for Black artists hoping to break into entertainment or any other field.
#Motown records was started in 1960 by full#
While civil rights protesters in the 1960s and ’70s voiced Black demands for full equality, it was Motown’s music that brought African American voices and faces into homes across the nation, introducing baby boomers and their parents to Black culture. Postman,” “Heat Wave,” “Where Did Our Love Go,” “My Girl,” and “What’s Going On.” It was music that not only dominated the charts for more than a decade, it gave shape to the national conversation. You know the names: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5.
From the day in January 1959 when he opened shop in downtown Detroit, Gordy had dedicated his life to Motown, ignoring the odds and naysayers to shape a business that would change contemporary culture. “How in the hell can anybody tell me I can’t sell something I created, nurtured and built from nothing?” “Do they know I’m losing millions?” Gordy wrote in his 1994 autobiography, To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown. On June 29, 1988, the 58-year-old signed on the dotted line, transferring ownership of Motown to rival MCA Inc. Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson even cornered Gordy at a fundraiser, declaring that “selling Motown would be a blow to Black people all over the world.” Gordy’s employees were unhappy about the deal. After almost three decades running Motown Records, Gordy was negotiating to sell the label, one of the country’s largest and most famous-yet floundering-Black-owned businesses. Throughout 1988, the pressure on Berry Gordy Jr. The following is from the LIFE’s new special issue on the music of Motown, available at newsstands and online.
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