Hitsville U.S.A., Motown and the Sound of Young America

On a cold January morning in nineteen fifty-nine, a twenty-nine-year-old songwriter and former assembly-line worker named Berry Gordy borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family and bought a house at two six four eight West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. He painted a sign above the front door: Hitsville U.S.

A. What happened inside that two-story house over the next decade would change popular music permanently. Gordy had already had songs recorded by Jackie Wilson and had gotten a feel for how the music business worked, and how, for Black artists, it usually worked against them.

What he built at Hitsville was something different: a fully integrated production company, from songwriting to recording to artist development to promotion and distribution. He called it Motown, after Detroit's nickname, Motor City. The house at West Grand Boulevard had a recording studio in what had been the photography studio at the back, and a quality control department, actually a weekly listening session where Gordy and his collaborators played new recordings and voted on whether they were good enough to release.

The standard was simple and absolute: would a tired factory worker who had just spent eight hours on the line want to dance to this? What emerged from that process, through the nineteen sixties, was a catalog of staggering scope. The Supremes.

Stevie Wonder. Marvin Gaye. The Four Tops.

The Temptations. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Martha and the Vandellas.

The Jackson Five. Gladys Knight and the Pips. These were not just popular acts.

They were the dominant force in American popular music for more than a decade, and they defined what soul music sounded like to the world. Motown moved its corporate headquarters to Los Angeles in nineteen seventy-two. Gordy eventually sold the company to MCA in nineteen eighty-eight.

The little house on West Grand Boulevard is now the Motown Museum, and the studio, Studio A, is preserved exactly as it was in nineteen fifty-nine. The floor still has the original linoleum. The echo chamber still works.

Berry Gordy knew from the start that what he was building was worth keeping.