Martha Reeves writes: “These musicians were responsible for all of the success of the singers at Motown, because it was their music that inspired us to sing our best with excitement.”
Based in the unassuming Gordy house identified only by a carved wooden sign with blue letters reading “HITSVILLE U.S.A.,” the Motown production style expressed the communal dynamic that almost everyone who was there in the early years describes as “magic.” Musicians hung out at Hitsville at all hours of the day and night. When a song was ready to be recorded, whoever happened to be around chipped in. No one minded being called out of bed to contribute a riff or lay down another take. Major stars sang backup and provided handclaps on each other’s records. Disputes over billing, favoritism, and royalty payments eventually soured many of the original Motown artists, but at the start they cherished their own beloved community.
The best emblem of that community may have been the Motown Revue, which toured the South late in 1962, when memories of the vicious attacks on the Freedom Riders were fresh in everyone’s minds. A lineup including Mary Wells, the Supremes, the Miracles, the Temptations, Edwin Starr, Marvin Gaye, “Little Stevie” Wonder, the Marvelettes, and Martha and the Vandellas played a grueling itinerary of ninety one-night stands. With rare exceptions, the singers slept on the tour bus. Cautioned by Gordy that they were representing “not only Motown records but all of Detroit,” the musicians made it work in the face of difficulties, both grave and comic. Shots were fired at the tour bus; at one rest stop, a hostile gas station attendant refused to let the “niggers” use the toilets. On the other hand, tour participants laughed about the elaborate ruses they employed to get around the chaperons assigned to prevent private meetings between male and female singers; the chimpanzee Edwin Starr snuck onto the bus; and the incessant harmonica playing that led to good-natured threats to drop Little Stevie off at the next godforsaken roadside stop.
Remembering Gordy as a “very spiritual” man with “visions far beyond any of our imaginations,” Martha Reeves sums up Motown in the early days as “an exciting place where magic was created.” Otis Williams describes a community where everyone “was young and driven by the same dreams. You didn’t have to explain yourself. We all had that passion about music and success. You wouldn’t think twice about pitching in to help with whatever had to be done, whether it was singing backgrounds or mopping the floor. Joining Motown was more like being adopted by a big loving family than being hired by a company. This isn’t just nostalgia talking either. It really was a magical time.”
5
The Big Chill vs. Cooley High:Two out of Three Falls for the Soul of Motown
By the time Motown achieved cliché status with The 25th Anniversary TV Special and the Big Chill sound track, anyone who had trouble seeing past the glitter could be forgiven. By the mid-eighties, the entertainment industry had shrunk Motown to video size, turned Levi Stubbs’s agony into a condiment for yuppie angst.
Five Motown classics punctuate the sound track of The Big Chill alongside sixties classics by the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band, the Young Rascals, and the Spencer Davis Group, which featured a young Stevie Winwood, the one white singer whose voice James Baldwin admitted misidentifying as black. In the world of The Big Chill, Motown provides the black part of a white mix. It’s not precisely a contradiction, more like a no-man’s-land of half-acknowledged emotional yearnings. Repeatedly, The Big Chill uses Motown cuts at moments of maximum emotional complexity. Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” sounds over the opening titles, which juxtapose the stark reality of suicide with a panorama of yuppie prosperity in the mid-Reagan era. Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” underscores the characters’ agonized regrets over not having intervened to save their dead friend. “I Second That Emotion” fuels the celebratory catharsis of the morning after. As musical commentary on the characters’ psychological struggles, the cuts work well.
But they don’t communicate the gospel energy they carried for large parts of their original audience. In The Big Chill, black folk exist only in the past. Although the film takes place in a small Southern town, not a single black face appears on screen. Characters refer to blacks only when talking about what they’ve given up. When Mary Kay Place and Jeff Goldblum get into a conversation about Place’s experience in a public defender’s office, Place laments the fact that her clients usually deserve their punishments. When Goldblum asks, “Who’d you think your clients were gonna be? Grumpy and Sneezy?” Tom Berenger interjects, “No, Huey and Bobby.” Similarly, Goldblum acknowledges that he’s lost the part of himself that “made me want to go to Harlem and teach those ghetto kids.” But there’s no sense that gospel politics means anything at all in the mid-eighties. And there’s less sense that the characters or the filmmakers hear the Motown music that accompanies their personal predicaments as a call to engage in any ongoing struggle. For them, Motown looks backward through an affable haze. The label’s willingness to cash in with an avalanche of recycled “Greatest Hits” compilations during the eighties did nothing to resist the lucrative nostalgia.
Motown looks and sounds a bit different if you track it through Cooley High (1975), a very different movie. On the West Side of Chicago, and in the imagination of director Michael Schultz, Motown explodes with kinetic energy. Whatever the surface message, the underlying dynamic demands assertiveness. Cooley High tells the story of a group of high school students growing up in black Chicago during the mid-sixties. The movie pulses with an energy and hope recalling the gospel politics that energized the beloved communities of the South.
The connection wasn’t accidental. Most black Chicagoans had family roots in the South, most frequently Mississippi and New Orleans. When Chicago industries, especially meatpacking and the slaughterhouses, faced labor shortages, they recruited workers from the other end of the Illinois Central Railroad line. Robert Abbott, publisher of the nationally circulated black newspaper the Chicago Defender, did everything in his power to accelerate the exodus. Describing a place more myth than economic reality, the Defender presented Chicago as Mahalia’s Jerusalem, a respite from the lynching and poverty of the South. Investigate the family histories of almost any great Chicago musician and you’ll find roots in the Delta. Sam Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Muddy Waters in Rolling Fork, Howlin’ Wolf from just the other side of the river in Osceola, Arkansas. Mavis Staples was born in Chicago after her father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, moved up from Winona.
Thousands of black Southerners streaming into Chicago during the Great Migration carried their music with them. Mahalia brought the sanctified singing of the New Orleans churches; Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters brought the Delta blues from the plantations and, given access to electricity, wasted no time plugging in their guitars. The Rolling Stones and Animals, as well as future Doors organist Ray Manzarek (who grew up in a white enclave on Chicago’s South Side), heard their call. Responding to the new experiences of a North that still maintained a romantic aura—a common rhyme declared “I’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the king of Mississippi”—the transplanted bluesmen bottlenecked Southern traditions into new forms that the Pullman porters carried back down the rail lines to share with the folks “down home.” When Chicago responded to the call of Mississippi, a new black voice was born.
Like its secular cousin, gospel was conceived in the South but some of its classic forms emerged in Chicago. Lifelong Southerners like Dorothy Love Coates and Clarence Fountain might disagree, but Southern-born Chicagoans like Sam Cooke and Mahalia made it clear that black culture could no longer be described solely as Southern. (And the folks who headed out west when the armaments industry needed workers for the Pacific campaign during World War II were already in the game. Specialty Records, the most important gospel label of the fifties, was based in L.A.) When Mahalia, Martin, and the beloved community used gospel to cement the foundation of a political movement, black Chicago, especially the older generation, was very much attuned to what was going on down home.
By the mid-sixties, however, a younger generation was coming into its own, a generation that had never lived in the Jim Crow South. Like the group setting out to fulfill Berry Gordy’s dream in Detroit, the young