Hitsville U.S.A.: The Sound of Young America

Berry Gordy was working on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line at the Ford plant on Michigan Avenue when he started thinking about applying the factory model to music. The idea was specific: a hit record was a product, and products could be made more reliably if you controlled every stage of production. Write the song in-house. Record it in-house. Manage the artist in-house. Control the publishing. Control the distribution. Build a quality control department that decided what got released and what did not.

In January of nineteen fifty-nine, Gordy borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family and bought a house at two six four eight West Grand Boulevard. He hung a sign that said Hitsville U.S.A. He had the recording studio built in the garage.

The system he built there produced a concentration of hit records that has not been equaled in American popular music before or since. Between nineteen sixty-one and nineteen seventy-one, Motown placed roughly one hundred ten songs in the top ten of the pop charts. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, Junior Walker and the All Stars. The artists were almost all from Detroit. Many of them were teenagers when they signed.

What the albums and the chart positions did not say was that beneath every vocal performance was a house band of studio musicians who played on virtually every Motown record ever made. They were called the Funk Brothers, and their names were not on the record labels. Earl Van Dyke on keyboards. James Jamerson on bass. Benny Benjamin and Uriel Jones on drums. Robert White and Joe Messina on guitar. They worked rotating shifts, six days a week, often recording multiple sessions in a single day, never knowing whose record they were making until the vocalist arrived. They were paid session wages.

When Motown moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in nineteen seventy-two, most of the Funk Brothers did not go. The work simply stopped. Some of them never recorded professionally again at that level. James Jamerson, whose bass lines on tracks like What's Going On and Bernadette are considered among the most influential in popular music, died in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty-three without wide recognition. A documentary about the Funk Brothers, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, was released in two thousand two. By then several of the musicians were gone.