Hitsville U.S.A.: The House Where Motown Was Born
Near Detroit, Michigan
On West Grand Boulevard in Detroit stands a modest two-story house with a sign above the door that reads Hitsville U.S.A. The sign has been there since nineteen fifty-nine. So has the story.
Berry Gordy Junior grew up in Detroit, the son of a plastering contractor, and spent time working on the Ford assembly line before deciding he wanted to be in the music business. His first venture, a jazz record store, failed. But Gordy had an ear for talent and a head for structure, he understood, from the assembly line, how a system of specialized labor could produce something greater than any one person working alone.
On January twelfth, nineteen fifty-nine, Gordy borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family's savings cooperative and founded Tamla Records, which became Motown Record Corporation in nineteen sixty. He purchased a house at two thousand six hundred forty-eight West Grand Boulevard, converted a photography studio in the back into a recording studio, and hung a hand-painted sign above the door. The neighbors thought he was running a gambling operation.
What he was running was a laboratory. Gordy hired a house band called the Funk Brothers, session musicians of extraordinary skill, and installed a quality control meeting every Friday where songs were evaluated before release. The system was intentional: if it did not sound like it would play on a car radio, it did not get released.
From that house came the sound of a decade. Diana Ross and the Supremes. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Marvin Gaye. Stevie Wonder. The Temptations. The Four Tops. The Jackson Five. Motown became the most commercially successful Black-owned business in United States history at the time, and its music crossed racial lines in American radio and television at a moment when almost nothing else did.
Gordy moved the company to Los Angeles in nineteen seventy-two. Berry Gordy's eldest sister, Esther Gordy Edwards, founded the Motown Museum in the original Hitsville building in nineteen eighty-five. The recording studio, Studio A, is preserved exactly as it was. The walls still have the egg cartons and tiling that served as soundproofing. The instruments are still there. It is one of the most important small rooms in the history of American music.
