Although the company was never quite the force in the 1970s that it was in the ’60s (having lost several key performers), it was still a formidable enterprise with the Jackson 5, the Commodores, Wonder, and Ross. In 1971 Motown released what became, arguably, the most influential soul ...
Motown 1. A shortening of the nickname "Motor Town," given to Detroit, Michigan, a center of auto manufacturing in the US.We're heading down to Motown for the weekend—want to come? 2. A genre of music featuring elements of rhythm and blues, pop, soul, and gospel popularized by Afric...
Motown was nothing if not aware of developments taking place around it. During the final years of the 60s, it had carefully positioned itself to compete in changing times. The work of producer Norman Whitfield had grown increasingly more questing, and with his songwriting partnerBarrett Strong, h...
great Aretha Franklin, Motown stalwart Stevie Wonder, the Bee Gees, Elton John and the Beatles’Ed Sullivan Showperformance, among others. But as music’s most prominent platform fawns over legendary artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s, one can’t help but feel ...
I didn’t know this but there once was a program in the early 1960s for women astronauts when NASA first began its quest to get to the moon and return. The men who ran the program in the early 60s killed it. The prejudices, social mores of that time and the boys club mentality sh...
the everyday people who worked with Motown — for a reason. Because the ‘60s were the most tumultuous decade in the last hundred years, and through all of that, here comes this little two-story family flat that had all that wonderful music. It was like wonderful music to a troubled sou...
the late 60s push into psychedelia helped to further mainstream the kind of hippie-fied funk Sly Stone was doing and the label’s classic disco years delivered some of that era’s most definitive music from acts like Thelma Houston and the Commodores. In the new jack swing era, Motown (hav...