Motown was always one of my favorite genres as a kid & teen when it was current. I still listen to it now, among other genres. One of its features was that the performers were almost universally black.
The question I have for the experts is who was the intended audience, black people, or white? Back in the day marketing for products in in general tended to be either/or, rather than both. It was a (much) less integrated world than today.
At the same time, that was also an era before the studios / record companies had really mastered inventing musical groups to fill a focus-group derived marketing niche as opposed to groups inventing themselves, some of whom proved popular by osmosis and some savvy promotion.
So perhaps the question above is (mostly) meaningless. Maybe there isn’t an “intended” audience, so much as an actual audience. In which case my question is maybe better posed as “Who really listened to / identified with Motown when it was current: blacks, whites, or both?”
Mary Wells hit #1 on the Billboard charts in 1964 with My Guy. To get the #1 spot you needed to be played on white radio stations. So, pretty early on in Motown (they were founded in 1959) they had conquered the crossover market.
What they wanted was for white audiences to buy the records.
There was a separate category for records aimed at Black audiences. But the really big money came in if you appealed to everyone. So the goal was to crossover.
But Motown basically was just trying to put out the best music they can, and Berry Gordy decided on releasing it.
I feel like some Motown groups were blacker than others, for instance the Four Tops and Junior Walker were funkier than the Supremes or the Marvellettes.
(Smokey Robinson rates his own special place.)
Growing up white in the Sixties, I listened to more Jefferson Airplane and Velvet Underground than I did soul music. Lots of the other kids liked Motown, but the “greasier” guys liked Stax better. Otis Redding, Sam and Dave etc. I feel like that music was much blacker than Motown.
Then there was a whole category of soul music that none of us knew about and I only learned to love later on: guys like Z.Z. Hill, O.V. Wright, etc. I don’t think they had the promotion and radio play (on white stations) that Stax and Motown did.
The Motown/Gordy/Tamla group might have been the first labels to actively seek to consistently appeal to both White and Black audiences. There were other labels with Black artists who had Top 40 radio hits, but they were hit or miss. Berry Gordy knew how to promote, and when they really hit their stride in 1964/65 with the Supremes, the 4 Tops, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye (who were both around before that), there was no stopping them. They found the perfect sound, and they ran with it. Gordy’s dream was to have his artists play Vegas and only the best venues, like the Apollo in New York, and leave the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit to lesser talents.
I’ve found, however, that the Motown sound is more fondly remembered today among Whites than Blacks. I worked for three Oldies-formatted stations, two as a DJ and another as an Ad Exec, and we played a very high percentage of Motown and other Soul music of the era, and none of those stations had significant audiences in the African American communities, despite having some Black DJs. In fact, it often seemed that adult Blacks disdained Motown as too White in retrospect, and therefore had no nostalgia for it.
As a geezery white guy I’m not fond of Rap or Hip Hop. Too aggressive and non-melodic for my aged tastes. I’ve noted with some disdain how a bunch of modern white younger folks of the appropriate age enjoyed and embraced that music as the music of their youth, as their own music.
Then I said “Hey, wait a minute; you did the same thing with Motown when you were young. And did so in a a much more racially separate era. Check your attitude, Gramps! Good is good regardless of the details.”
I think one can look at Motown and earlier labels as trying to sell the music white people were already buying, but to get the money and credit that these artists deserved. Wikipedia has lists of Billboard charts, and you can look and see what different radio stations were playing.
A LOT of the YouTubes available now of Motown acts are from the period TV show
In them, the vast majority of the dancers for Motown acts in the studio “audience” (read “paid shills”) are black.
Clearly somebody at the studios thought that was congruous, not incongruous. Even while they may have been, as suggested above,chasing the white demographic for raw volume and purchasing power.
I grew up listening to Motown music. The period when I first got into listening to music on the radio (in the mid-1960s) was the period when Motown was best. I still consider The Four Tops to be my favorite group. I grew up on a farm in Ohio in an area where everyone, like me, was white. I knew that the singers of Motown music were black and didn’t care. I saw some of them on television shows. Incidentally, the radio station I listened to was in Canada. CKLW in Windsor, Ontario is right across the border from Detroit and it was one of the ones that played a lot of Motown back then. I’ve never remotely cared what the singers looked like as long as I liked their music.
I’m sure there are better cites, but here’s an excerpt from the Irish Times.
“Gordy did not want to confine himself to black radio stations or the black touring circuit – Motown was all about pop music with a mass appeal. The only way he could get white radio to play Motown songs was to hire an all-white sales and marketing force.
‘It was similar in the case of single and album covers – Gordy put a picture of a white couple on the cover of an Isley Brothers album and, in the early days, would never put a photograph of the artist on the sleeve.”
I got curious and checked the Billboard year-end Top 50 R&B singles for 1963. They included hits by The Four Seasons, Paul and Paula, Little Peggy March, Dion, Lesley Gore, Jimmy Gilmore and the Fireballs, Skeeter Davis, and the whiter-than white Walk Right In by the Rooftop Singers.
Meanwhile, the top 50 of Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1963 included The Chiffons, (Little) Stevie Wonder, Inez and Charlie Foxx, Martha & the Vandellas, Ray Charles, Jimmy Soul, The Essex, Ruby and The Romantics, and a half-dozen others.
So, 30% of Billboard’s hottest songs were by R&B artists, and white artists had made a sizable dent in the R&B charts. The time was right for Gordy to design acts and songs that targeted anyone and everyone. Hell, if Ray Charles had two successful albums of country music, anything was possible!
Just heard a rerun of Fresh Air with Terry interviewing Lamont, Dozier, and Lamont. Interesting guys, and damn they wrote some good tunes over the years.
One thing to keep in mind in this discussion; back in the days of radio and jukeboxes, you could hear a song and not know the singer’s skin color.
Every group or singer Motown signed were trained by in-house choreographers who developed the dance routines. They also had professionals for choosing the stage outfits. Motown really was a record label with an industrial approach and Berry Gordy styled his acts and their image in every little way imaginable. Granted, it was also easier for all-vocal groups like the Supremes, the Temptations or the Four Tops to dance in sync than for four or five guys with instruments in a rock band.
Huh?
This is exactly what Gordy and Motown did. Assembly line music. Songwriters cranking out cookie cutter hits (a la Tin Pan Alley). with interchangeable hyper-styled artists, that certainly shouldn’t look too black, nor sound that way.
For those not aware of this prolific songwriter, he penned hits like: “Baby Love", “Where Did Our Love Go”, “Baby I Need Your Loving”, “You Can’t Hurry Love”, “Reach Out, I’ll Be There”, “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)”, “Stop! In The Name of Love”, “Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart”, “Heat Wave”, “Nowhere to Run”, “Bernadette”, and “It’s The Same Old Song”.
He ranks up there with The Funk Brothers as one of those people behind the people who made the Motown sound what it was.
