What Berry Gordy Built at Two Six Four Eight

In January of nineteen fifty-nine, Berry Gordy borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family's savings club and bought a two-story house at two thousand six hundred forty-eight West Grand Boulevard. He nailed a sign above the front door that said Hitsville U.S.A. He converted the garage into a recording studio. He was twenty-nine years old.

In the thirteen years that Motown Records operated out of those two houses, the label released more number-one pop singles than any other company in the country. The Marvelettes delivered the first, "Please Mr. Postman," in nineteen sixty-one, the first Motown song to reach number one on the Billboard pop chart. The Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Smokey Robinson followed in a succession that reshaped American popular music.

What Gordy built was more than a record label. He built a system. The Artist Development department coached performers in choreography, diction, wardrobe, and stage etiquette, preparing Black artists from Detroit's working class to perform in white-owned television studios, supper clubs, and concert halls that had never before welcomed them as anything other than novelty. The company's marketing positioned the music as "the sound of young America," not Black music, not Detroit music. The crossover strategy was calculated and it worked.

Gordy moved Motown to Los Angeles in nineteen seventy-two, partly for film ambitions, partly because the uprising of nineteen sixty-seven had already begun the economic collapse of Detroit's commercial corridors. The two houses on West Grand Boulevard still stand. This is where American pop music was invented, block by block, track by track, in a garage with a sign above the door.