Berry Gordy Jr. is a legendary figure in the world of music and entertainment. Born in 1929 in Detroit, Michigan, Gordy got his start in the music industry as a songwriter and record producer. He went on to found Motown Records, which became one of the most successful and influential record labels of all time.
Gordy's early life was marked by hardship and struggles. He grew up in a poor neighborhood and had to work hard to make ends meet. Despite this, he was always drawn to music and spent much of his free time writing songs and dreaming of a career in the music industry.
In the late 1950s, Gordy decided to take the leap and start his own record label. He named it Motown, after the city of his birth, and set out to create a new sound that would appeal to a wide audience. Over the next few decades, Motown became a cultural phenomenon, with a roster of talented artists that included the likes of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson 5.
Gordy's vision for Motown was to create a place where artists could be themselves and express their creativity without being held back by the constraints of the music industry. He believed that music should be a force for positive change and that it could bring people together from all walks of life.
Under Gordy's leadership, Motown became a powerhouse in the music industry, producing hit after hit and influencing the sound of popular music for decades to come. In addition to producing some of the most iconic music of the 20th century, Motown also played a significant role in the Civil Rights movement and helped to break down barriers and promote equality and acceptance.
Gordy's impact on the music industry cannot be overstated. He was a pioneer and a visionary who changed the face of music forever. His legacy lives on through the many talented artists he helped to launch and through the enduring appeal of the music he helped to create. So, Berry Gordy Jr. is a man who has left a lasting mark on the world of music and entertainment, and he will always be remembered as one of the greatest innovators in the industry.
Berry Gordy, Jr.
Through his sister The trio's hits for Setting up a publishing company, Gordy met a young singer named With the success of the Over the next several years, Gordy drew on his automobile-production roots to create an assembly line of hits and hitmakers at Motown. The late Leonard Chess discovered his artists in his bar, recorded them himself, and then sold their releases from out of the trunk of his car. The monotony was formidable, and Gordy's way of overcoming it was to write songs in his head, some of which were recorded by local singers. By the mid 1970s, some of the Motown artists had begun to resist Gordy's tight control. A fairly successful lightweight, at 19 Gordy had an epiphany concerning his future. It is safe to say that from 1965 to 1967 ninety percent of all Motown records possessed every one of these qualities.
Gordy also had a son with Margaret Norton in 1964 whom they named Kennedy, after John F. The Motown Sound was a musical genre that combined classic African American gospel singing with the new rock-and-roll sound that was being shaped by Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Two of Gordy's family members have written telling tales of the man: Berry, Me and Motown 1990 by Raynoma Gordy Singleton, Gordy's second wife; and Movin' Up: Pop Gordy Tells His Story 1979 by Berry Gordy Senior. Two books which tell the story particularly well, with outstanding photographs, are Motown: Hot Wax, City Cool and Solid Gold 1986 by J. Dividing his time between writing songs on the piano and training at a local Detroit gym under champion trainer Eddie Futch, Gordy fostered both talents. Singers who have signed on to sing some of Gordy's songs on the tribute album include Diana Ross, the Four Tops, the Temptations and Smokey Robinson.
The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound 1985 by Nelson George, with a foreword by Quincy Jones. In 1967 they left the company and Motown moved into its modern phase. Upon his discharge from the Army in 1953, Berry Gordy returned to Detroit and used his service pay to open the Three-D Record Mart. They only did in the sense that all Warner Brothers detective pictures looked the same in the Forties. Supporting his wife and three children by working in a Detroit auto plant and songwriting at night, Gordy's compositions were soon finding their way into the hands of local artists.
As long as these artists can turn out profitable records, the executives of their companies are happy to let them do as they wish. One has the feeling, whether it is true or not, that Berry Gordy passes personal judgment on every single that comes out on his label. Numerous books recount the rise of Motown as a major contributor to popular music, all of which feature Berry Gordy as the man who started it all. Meanwhile many of the artists such as Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, the Temptations, and Marvin Gaye moved to other labels while early artists and writers such as Eddie Holland and members of the Vandellas and the Marvelettes sued Motown for back royalties. In 2021, he was awarded the In 2022, he was inducted into the In 2022, he was awarded with an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan. Realizing the tough life of a boxer compared to the classier life of a musician, he devoted all his energies to songwriting. Instead a variety of men and women have emerged, each with their own special talents, each capable of consistently producing top ten records.
The Untold Truth Of Motown Founder Berry Gordy Jr.
. He was not the first businessman in the family; both parents were self-employed, his father as a plastering contractor, his mother as an insurance agent. Even though Gordy was often times hailed as an entrepreneur, he was first and foremost a song-writer. In the process, Gordy also brought the world countless memorable songs, not only through his vision for spotting talent in others, but also his own talent as a songwriter and producer. No one production team has been allowed to dominate the creative process the way Holland and Dozier did in the middle Sixties.
Berry Gordy married Thelma Coleman in 1953. Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. The founder of Motown Records, Berry Gordy did what many people of his time believed could never be done: he brought Black music into millions of White Americans' homes, helping both Black artists and their culture gain acceptance, and opening the door for a multitude of successful Black record executives and producers. The song sold more than a million copies, and with that gold record, Berry Gordy's company launched the most successful and influential era in the history of popular music. Newsweek May 23, 1983 featured an interview and well-told background story. When it proved right to millions of record buyers, it only served to confirm their personal judgment, not to determine it.
Motown Records was headquartered in a row house on Detroit's West Grand Boulevard, where Gordy slept on the second floor and made records on the first. Unfamiliar with the market and the music, the new men as well as the older record men still active do not run an in-house operation with all of its fixed expenses, but instead prefer a system of independent production in which the company invests in specific projects, finances and distributes them, and occupies itself as little as possible with the actual details of artistic production, about which it knows very little. As a result, the Motown sound today is more diversified than at any time since its earliest days, and yet, like those early records, they are all clearly Motown records. She saved hundreds of boxes of memorabilia, including original music scores, posters, and photographs, and until 1988 most of the mementos were stuck to the walls with thumbtacks. Influential artists such as Berry Gordy was born in Detroit in 1929, during the early years of the Depression. There he concentrated on The sale of Motown, though sad for many, was concrete proof of Gordy's success.
The inner determination of a Leonard Chess, the personal commitment to a specific musical outlook, has always been the strength of the independent. As surely as Atlantic was the greatest independent record company of the Fifties, Motown was the greatest of the Sixties. In the Los Angeles area Gordy lived in a Bel Air estate and highly valued his privacy, rarely dealing with the press. He knew blues so he recorded blues. Related Trick or Treat: The Best Musician Halloween Costumes to Add to Your Closet What was the Motown sound? So the history of Motown over the last 10 years is the history of two things: the growth of an independent corporation and the development of a creative musical collective factory responsible for a specific musical style.
Subjects: Terms: Do you find this information helpful? For, like all great popular art, Motown confined itself in formal ways to liberate itself in other ways. Today, no one on the Atlantic staff has anything to do with the actual recording of Led Zeppelin or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, no one at Warners pretends to understand the musical virtues of Black Sabbath, and when the Band goes into the studio for Capitol these days, one assumes they do as they please. But it is not true, as has been charged from time to time, that as a result, all Motown records sounded the same. Gordy's second marriage was to Raynoma Liles in 1959; they had one son, Kerry. Gordy was interviewed by the popular media numerous times over the years, especially in 1983 during the celebration of Motown's 25th anniversary.
