The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard Read Online Free PDF Page B

next to nothing and going nowhere. They wanted to make a record, have all their friends hear it, sing it to adoring throngs at packed concerts, and ride around in limos. They wanted fame, and cutting a record was the only way to become big-time singers. As Mary put it, “No records, no career.”
    They kept asking Jenkins to hook them up with a recording company, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t. All Jenkins seemed to be able to do was get local gigs.
    Then, in the summer of 1960, someone who knew someone saw the Primettes singing in a church recreation room and told Motown Records they looked promising. Motown songwriter Richard Morris asked them in to audition.
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    Motown Record Company would soon alter American music and American attitudes permanently. It was the linchpin in the successful struggle launched by black musicians and black music executives to stop whites from stuffing their pockets with the millions of dollars that resulted from the sales of tunes written, sung, and often produced by blacks.
    Motown was founded by Berry Gordy, one of eight children who inherited their highly entrepreneurial parents’ interest in business and in getting ahead. As a child and adolescent, Gordy had resisted helping his father in his plastering business, print shop, and grocery store. Nor did he join his mother in her insurance business and political activities. He insisted instead on picking out tunes on the piano in the Gordys’ basement and singing in talent shows, and he went his own way competitively by becoming a boxer, probably the most independent move he ever made.
    Five feet six inches tall, and thin, Gordy started as a flyweight; he worked and grew his way to bantamweight and finally featherweight (126 pounds).
    He then dropped out of high school and turned pro, slugging it out all over America for two years until he realized that no matter how well he did, light-weight boxing champs in the United States are neither rich nor famous.
    Gordy wanted to be both. Besides, one of his pals at the gym was Jackie Wilson, who had musical ambitions.
    After spending two uneventful years as an army draftee, Gordy started his musical career by opening a jazz record store in Detroit with his army savings and some borrowed money. He loved jazz but there wasn’t enough of a local market for jazz recordings to support his store, and it went bankrupt within a year or two. From then on he vowed to concentrate on what music consumers liked when he was putting musical products on the market.
    Noting the growing music scene in Detroit, which had already swept up Flo Ballard and her friends, Gordy started writing songs for Jackie Wilson, who had started to sing commercially. Four of the five songs he wrote—“Reet Petite,” “To Be Loved,” “I’ll Be Satisfied,” and “That’s Why”—were hits. The 16
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    fifth song, “Lonely Teardrops” (1958), was not only a hit but a monster hit.
    It was the story of a million teenage lives. Gordy had established himself as a songwriter, but he hadn’t yet achieved fame or fortune.
    Gordy soon realized that he was no more going to get rich as a songwriter than as a boxer. On his wall he hung the $3.19 royalty check that was his entire payment for one of his hit records—just to remind him of this fact. While peddling songs to various singers, he had become aware that there were many vocalists in Detroit looking for not only songs to sing but also record contracts to make them rich. He took the hint and became a record producer, selling the master recordings he produced to record companies in New York City.
    Still, Gordy’s profit margin remained razor thin. His major preoccupa-tion in those days was reflected in one of the hit records he wrote around this time: “Money (That’s What I Want).” (Gordy was not subtle, at least not in his songwriting.) Finally, his pal Smokey Robinson allegedly told him, “Why work for the man? Why not