O’Brien (2002: 68) has noted that three Brill Building husband-and-wife songwriting teams were the “nucleus of the girl-group industry” until Motown moved in: Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry (see figure 25). She has succinctly summarized part of the significance of this moment in the early 1960s: “Women love telling stories—they read them to children at night, they relate them to girlfriends in the ladies’ room—the girl-group era is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound” (2002: 67).5
MOTOWN
In 1959 Detroit native Berry Gordy Jr. (1929–) founded the Tamla and then Motown record labels in his hometown. Several additional subsidiaries were folded into Motown, including Anna, Gordy, and Soul. Tamla had its first hits the following year with Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” (pop #23) and the Miracles’ (featuring Smokey Robinson) “Shop Around” (pop #2). Gordy had initially entered the music business cowriting the hits “Reet Petite” (1957) and “Lonely Teardrops” (1958) for Jackie Wilson. In 1961 Motown had its first pop #1 hit with the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman.”
Berry Gordy and Motown, a predominantly black corporation, were known for their investment in their artists and full in-house production, including a recording studio (Hitsville U.S.A.); songwriters, producers, sales and promotion personnel; a choreographer (Cholly Atkins); charm and poise instructor (Maxine Powell); publishing company (Jobete); and a house band. That band was known as the Funk Brothers and featured Benny Benjamin (drums), James Jamerson (bass), Earl Van Dyke (piano), and Robert White (guitar), among many others, most of whom had a significant jazz background. Jamerson in particular is highly regarded as one of the most sensitive and creative bass players of his era. Motown began recording on eight tracks in 1964 (with the Supremes’ “Baby Love”), increasing the clarity and giving a more prominent role to Jamerson, whose bass had its own track.6
Gordy’s whole Motown operation consciously resembled the Detroit auto-plant assembly lines on which he worked. As Gordy has noted, “Every day I watched how a bare metal frame, rolling down the line would come off the other end, a spanking brand new car. What a great idea! Maybe, I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star” (Motown Museum 2019).
Motown songwriters included the teams of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland (“Heat Wave,” “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “How Sweet It Is,” “You Can’t Hurry Love”) and Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Reach Out and Touch”); and individuals, including Smokey Robinson (“The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “My Guy,” “My Girl,” “Get Ready”) and Norman Whitfield (“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “I Heard It through the Grapevine,” “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”).
The Funk Brothers and their producers were largely responsible for the recognizable Motown sound. Animated by Jamerson’s prominent dynamic bass lines (e.g., “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”), tambourines or handclaps, and relatively sophisticated musical forms (that rarely drew on the blues), the Motown sound reflected an upwardly mobile, rather than down home southern, aesthetic. Although Motown singers could draw on deep gospel inflections (e.g., “Heat Wave”), their delivery was typically smoother (often complemented with orchestral strings by mid-decade) than that of singers coming out of the southern soul Stax and Fame studios.
Between 1960 and 1970 Motown had ten artists or groups with three or more pop Top 10 hits (see figure 27). A roster of about two dozen artists produced about a hundred pop Top 10 hits during this decade, making the label one of the most vital musical forces of its time. The most commercially successful artists and groups were the Supremes, Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson Five, who had their first hit in 1969.
Motown moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and in 1983 celebrated its twenty-fifth-year anniversary with a television special that reunited many artists and groups who had left the label, including Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five. Michael Jackson’s performance of “Billie Jean” was particularly iconic as he performed the moonwalk to a large national audience for the first time. While Gordy is widely respected as one of the most successful and visionary entrepreneurs in the music business with a label that has won exceptional and enduring critical acclaim, he has also been the target of lawsuits regarding improprieties with royalties by some Motown artists, including Barrett Strong, Mary Wells, Mary Wilson, and the songwriting team of Holland, Dozier, and Holland, who left the label in 1968.7
URBAN FOLK REVIVAL
In the late 1950s and early 1960s a second wave of an urban folk revival hit. The initial high point took place at the July 1963 Newport Folk Festival, with rousing renditions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome” at the end of Bob Dylan’s set, where he was joined by Joan Baez; the acoustic guitar and vocal trio Peter, Paul, and Mary; the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Singers; and Pete Seeger. The following month Dylan, Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang at the March on Washington before several hundred thousand people. When Dylan played an electric guitar set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, many saw this as the end of an era.
The first wave took place in the 1930s and 1940s with the arrival in Greenwich Village of Louisiana singer-guitarist Lead Belly in 1935, New England–bred Harvard dropout Pete Seeger in the late 1930s, and Oklahoma singer-songwriter-guitarist Woody Guthrie in 1940. Seeger apprenticed with Guthrie and formed the Almanac Singers, recording together in 1941. Guthrie, who wrote “This Land Is Your Land” within weeks of arriving in New York City in early 1940, would suffer from a debilitating disease that would put him out of commission by the early 1950s and in hospital care for much of the rest of his life (he died in 1967). Seeger formed the Weavers in 1949, and the following year they became the first folk group to have major commercial success, hitting #1 on the pop charts in the summer with “Goodnight Irene” (the flip-side “Tzena Tzena” hit #2 at the time).
That same summer of 1950, however, a right-wing organization issued the publication Red Channels, which named 151 people in the media (including Seeger and other musicians and actors) and listed their alleged communist sympathies (including membership in peace and other democratic organizations). This contributed to a wave of anticommunist paranoia that was earlier exacerbated in 1947 with the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating alleged communist infiltration in Hollywood, questioning the loyalty of actors, directors, and screenwriters. The blacklists that ensued denied employment in the entertainment industry, typically on the basis of being associated with progressive organizations that were fully legal.
Just as quickly as the Weavers had risen to stardom, so nightclubs and organizations were afraid to hire them for fear of a backlash. Folk music, which had strong pro-union and socialist leanings, was driven underground during this era, the high (or low) point of which were hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953–54. Pete Seeger was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and lectured his inquisitors about questioning his loyalty. He was indicted for contempt of Congress in 1957, convicted in 1961, and sentenced to ten one-year terms in prison (one for each question he did not answer) to be served concurrently, but in 1962 the conviction was overturned. In December 1954 the Senate had voted to censure Senator McCarthy.
The release of the six-LP set Anthology of American Folk Music (edited by Harry Smith) on the Folkways label in 1952 was a major event in the reemergence of folk music later in the decade. Consisting of reissues of recordings of a diverse range of American music from 1927 to 1932 (blues, white and black gospel, jug bands, old-time fiddle), the Anthology provided a blueprint for the generation growing up in the 1950s.
The second wave of the urban folk