Florence Ballard and the Supremes

Florence Ballard grew up in the Brewster-Douglass housing projects on the east side of Detroit, the same neighborhood that produced Diana Ross and Mary Wilson. She was sixteen years old in nineteen fifty-nine when she, Ross, and Wilson formed the group that would become the Supremes. Ballard chose the name. She was one of the original voices, a contralto with a different quality than Ross's soprano, and through the early years her voice anchored the group's sound.

By nineteen sixty-seven, Berry Gordy had decided that Diana Ross was the Supremes, that the group's commercial future ran through Ross's image and voice, and that Ballard was a liability. The details of what happened internally are recorded in Motown scholarship but not settled in a single authoritative account. What is settled: in July of nineteen sixty-seven, Ballard was informed she was out. Cindy Birdsong replaced her without public announcement. Ballard received a settlement of somewhere under one hundred fifty thousand dollars. She signed away her royalty rights to every recording she had made.

The recordings she had made continued earning for Motown, for the Supremes, and eventually for Berry Gordy's estate. Florence Ballard did not benefit from them.

She was dead nine years later, in February of nineteen seventy-six, thirty-two years old, on public assistance in Detroit, with medical bills she could not pay. The obituaries noted that she had co-founded the Supremes. Some of them noted that she died poor.

The studio where she made those recordings is a hundred feet from where you are standing.