than a minimal fee. As Brother John Sellers, another of Mahalia’s friends alienated by financial problems, remembers: “We didn’t do right by [Mildred]. But you couldn’t talk to Mahalia about Mildred’s situation. She didn’t want to hear about her. When Mahalia had money, nobody could talk to her.”
James Brown dealt with the money problem by emphasizing the need for black economic self-determination. An ad Brown placed in New York City newspapers just before a 1969 appearance at Madison Square Garden proclaimed: “James Brown is totally committed to black power, the kind that is achieved not through the muzzle of a rifle but through education and economic leverage.” Brown’s embrace of “black capitalism” grew out of his experience on the “chitlin circuit”: the black theaters and clubs famed for presenting performers with the toughest audiences imaginable. Exercising total control over his creative product and enforcing band discipline with monetary fines for mistakes, Brown earned nearly universal recognition as the “hardest-working man in show business” and “the Godfather of Soul.” Even after he’d performed at the inaugural ball for Richard Nixon, another advocate of black capitalism, Brown steadfastly maintained, “I’d rather play for my folks at the Apollo than play the White House.” But he definitely cashed Nixon’s check.
Although Brown was delighted when his records crossed over onto the pop charts, he never surrendered the profound suspicions he’d acquired growing up in South Carolina, where it wasn’t any too clear the white folks had gotten word that slavery had come to an end. Brown never established a workable relationship with the mainstream economic system. For all his emphasis on black economic power, he simply didn’t take good care of the books. The IRS wasn’t buying his lack of formal education as an adequate excuse, a point it made absolutely clear in 1968 when it confiscated his files and billed him for $1,870,000 in back taxes. As a result, he spent a good part of the seventies struggling to clear his tax problems and extricate himself from disastrous record contracts.
Berry Gordy wasn’t about to make those sorts of mistakes, even if it meant relying heavily on experienced white accountants to take care of financial business. Motown’s rise presents a perfect parable of black capitalism in action. For Gordy, attention to economics was a family tradition. As Motown chronicler Nelson George points out, the Gordy family moved from Georgia to Detroit for the most unlikely of all reasons: Berry Gordy, Sr., “made too much money,” thereby attracting the envy of local white merchants who set about relieving him of the problem. The younger Gordy grew up in an atmosphere where capitalism’s primary virtues—competitiveness and a strong appreciation for the dollar bill—were articles of faith. It’s appropriate that Gordy’s first real success in the music business came when he wrote Barrett Strong’s hit “Money (That’s What I Want).” Looking back on his breakthrough, Gordy said: “I was broke until the time I wrote ‘Money’; even though I had many hits, and there were other writers who had many hits, we just didn’t have profits. And coming from a business family, my father and mother always talked about the bottom line, and simple things, and the bottom line is profit. You know, are you making money or not?”
Like Booker T. Washington, whom the family’s grocery business was named after, Gordy wore whatever mask suited his purposes. Where the masks of Mahalia’s music covered a political agenda, Motown’s masks were designed to bring the highest price on the open market. Gordy was aware that white folks wanted to get close to the aura of black sexuality, black danger, without putting their self-image at risk. He’d served his apprenticeship in the music world writing songs such as “Lonely Teardrops” and “To Be Loved” for Jackie Wilson, whose sexuality was just dangerous enough to keep him on the wrong side of the color line. At Motown, Gordy kept enough of the blackness—the churchy feel of David Ruffin’s lead vocals or the label’s signature tambourine—to set Motown apart from bland white pop. But he repressed the sexuality sufficiently to soothe the fears of uneasy parents. Motown worked hard to reassure America that the danger was safely under control, that the songs were about romance, not sex. Diana Ross and Tammi Terrell sounded like nice teenage girls; Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, and the young Marvin Gaye aspired to Las Vegas respectability. In a country conditioned to fear black females as Jezebels threatening the sanctity of white marriage, Motown promoted the Supremes as the quintessential “girl group.”
Gordy owed much of Motown’s success to the Artist Development Department. Under the guidance of etiquette expert Maxine Powers, choreographer Cholly Atkins, and musical director Maurice King, Artist Development transformed talented but unsophisticated teenagers into polished entertainers. If the opportunity to dine at the White House arose, Motown’s acts would know which fork to use.
Artist Development had an equally profound impact on the records released on the Motown, Tamla, Gordy, and Anna labels. Singers attended elocution lessons to help them with the press and to make sure white listeners unaccustomed to the sound of black voices could understand the words. Otis Williams of the Temptations recalled: “A producer or a singer might love a great, elaborate vocal riff, but we rarely put them on our records because we knew that most people who bought the records wouldn’t be able to sing along to those parts, especially not the white folks.”
For all the awareness of the mainstream audience, Motown singles spoke deeply to almost everyone who heard them, black or white. The obvious key to the success was that the label featured some of the most distinctive voices in popular music history. David Ruffin of the Temptations accented syllables that most other singers would have treated as throwaways; Smokey Robinson’s delicate lilt reconciled the choir loft and the malt shop; Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops expressed the darkest corners of the blues; Tammi Terrell radiated a girl-next-door sweetness; Martha Reeves added gospel depth to “Dancing in the Street” and “Nowhere to Run.” On almost any other label, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder wouldn’t have had serious competition.
But great as the singers were, the house musicians informally known as the Funk Brothers contributed at least as much to Motown’s success. The lineup varied somewhat, but the core consisted of Earl Van Dyke on keyboards; Robert White or Eddie Willis on guitar; Jack Ashford on vibes and tambourine; Eddie “Bongo” Brown on percussion; Benny Benjamin on drums; and James Jamerson, the least-recognized indisputable genius of soul music, on bass. Frequently playing off dramatic horn charts that established a compelling hook, the percussionists laid down a polyrhythmic foundation while Jamerson played bass lines that remain as stunning today as they were in the sixties. No one has ever matched his ability to improvise bass lines that define a song’s spirit. He seemed equally at home with the deceptively simple solo that opens “My Girl”; the dramatic runs that reconcile the pop verses with the gospel chorus of “Nowhere to Run”; the bouncy pop of “Stop! In the Name of Love”; and the intricate funk of “I Was Made to Love Her” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” Jamerson attributed his style to influences that ranged from the arcane to the everyday call-and-response rituals of black Detroit:
My feel was always an Eastern feel, a spiritual thing. Take “Standing in the Shadows of Love.” The bass line has an Arabic feel. I’ve been around a whole lot of people from the East, from China and Japan. Then I studied the African, Cuban, and Indian scales. I brought all that with me to Motown. There were people from the East in my neighborhood. I’d run into Eastern musicians who liked the way I played and they’d keep in contact with me.
I picked up things from listening to people speak, the intonations of their voices; I could capture a line. I look at people walking and get a beat from their movements. . . . There was one of them heavy, funky tunes the Temptations did. . . . I can’t remember the name but there was this big, fat woman walking around. She couldn’t keep still. I wrote it by watching her move.
The Funk Brothers aren’t recognized by the general public in part because Motown’s emphasis on marketing stars kept the musicians’ names off the album covers. The label’s production strategy, a variation on Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” made it easy to overlook their individual brilliance. The major Motown producers—Gordy, Smokey Robinson, the songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Norman Whitfield—filled in all available sonic space. Instruments emerge from the mix briefly, but the richly orchestrated harmonies make it difficult to follow particular instruments or voices through entire songs. Yet almost every singer who worked with the Funk Brothers speaks of them