The music publishing and record businesses really resisted rock and roll and rhythm and blues for quite a while. There were some events that happened in the 1960s, however, that really turned the tables and put rock and soul front and center.
Music had became more sophisticated, leading rhythm and blues to morph into something called “soul music.” In a simpler sense, soul music was rhythm and blues merged with the harmonies, rhythms, and cadences of the Black church. Some of the early specialists in soul music were Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Jackie Wilson.
The Father of Soul
There was a very important entrepreneur in the early soul music industry. A man named Berry Gordy owned a jazz record store in Detroit. It went out of business because kids were not buying jazz records anymore, so he decided to create rhythm and blues records.
Berry Gordy, however, did something that no record entrepreneur had ever done before. He created an assembly line, much like the auto plants in Detroit. He had teams of songwriters writing songs and teams of producers working with performers to get the songs onto records. He had a world-class band of in-house musicians called the Funk Brothers. He had his own management and publishing companies, and even his own charm school and choreography school.
Motown was a one-stop shop. It was the birth of something music producers now call “artist development,” with Berry Gordy as its father.
Assembling a Mowtown Track
“I think during the Motown era, the wonderful thing about the entire music company was that artists had an opportunity to develop in so many areas,” comments vocal music professor and record producer Marlon Saunders. Indeed, artists had the ability to rehearse and work through harmonies. They learned how to sing together, be in the recording studio, go on the road, and perform on stage. They also had time to develop as artists.
Motown was a different era, so artists had tremendous hands-on experience happening quickly and in the moment. “So in the midst of everybody being in the room, and everything happening at the same time, your game has to really, really, really be focused. Because, you think about it, if everyone’s in the room and they’re hitting the button to record, one mistake, you got to start over,” Saunders says. “So that means the level of concentration was different.”
We live in a world where people can access on-demand online music education and work towards everything being perfect. It is amazing that we have gotten to that ability. But, as a singer, your subconscious mind may tell you that you can always re-record the song or tune the recording. “If you don’t have that, if that was never something that you could envision, even how you practiced was different,” says Saunders. Singers practiced for perfection, making the skill level different.
The Appeal of Soul
Smokey Robinson wrote “The Tracks of My Tears” for his Motown band, The Miracles. “Take a good look at my face. You’ll see my smile looks out of place,” reads the chorus. “If you look closer it’s easy to track the tracks of my tears.”
“Who writes like that?” asks Kerry Gordy, fourth-generation record producer and the son of Berry Gordy. “You know, it’s like that’s some amazing, amazing writing.” When producers at Motown would receive songs, they would break them down, listen to them, and make sure that they really said something. “And that’s the reason why our songs, 50 years later, are still doing well and still amazing,” he opines.
Gordy takes awe in that he can sit with young people and sing “I guess you say, what can make me feel this way?” Everyone will respond singing “my girl,” the refrain of a now 50-year-old song. “So think about that,” he says. “That is the concept of how we wrote our songs at Motown.”
Gordy is a passionate person when it comes to both the song and to the artist. People in marketing will say that a song is nothing without the marketing. “I say, you’re correct, but it’s nothing without that song that actually inspires the feeling, and the thought, and the passion,” he responds.
