“Come To Me” by Marv Johnson is the first release on Tamla Records in January 1959. The paltry income leads Gordy to open his own label in Detroit, with a Gordy family loan of $800. He takes on management of the singers – yes, they are the Miracles – and produces their early recordings, leased to companies in Chicago and New York.
They are turned down, but he discerns the songwriting ability of its leader, a teenage William “Smokey” Robinson.
After serving in Korea, he tries his hand at professional boxing.
Berry Gordy starts writing songs, including one (“You Are You”) he mails to movie star/singer Doris Day.
Pictured in Color at the piano, he is said to provide “the music for frequent family song sessions in the Gordy home.” The magazine adds that “he won the semi-final competition in Frankie Carle’s Boogie Woogie contest at the Michigan Theater in Detroit.” At this point, Motown Records isn’t even a dream. One of them, Berry Jr., was born November 28, 1929, in the Motor City. and wife Bertha are photographed with their children: four boys, four girls. “America’s Most Amazing Family” is the subject of a 1949 article in Color magazine, highlighting the social and business success of the Gordy family from Detroit.Career highlight: receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Obama at the White House in 2016.What’s Going On? Songs In The Key of Life? Diana? With A Lot O’ Soul? Can’t Slow Down? Check that list Biggest hit: choose from the dozens of Motown singles which topped the Billboard Hot 100 during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.First hit: “Reet Petite,” Jackie Wilson.In honor of their continuing impact and dominance, here are the boy band heartthrobs’ pop confections worth screaming for.
The main defining factor? The venues full of screaming fans - always young, mostly girls - who help turn a boy band into a cultural artifact worth admiring and singing along to even after their inevitable disbandment or “hiatus.” But like any other form art, you know a boy band when you see one. Sometimes they are literally boys, sometimes they’re twentysomethings with boyish charm. Sometimes they sing words they’ve written themselves, sometimes they sing other people’s. Sometimes they are total strangers, sometimes they have known each other since birth. Their existence is a pop constant but parameters have always been blurred: sometimes they dance and sometimes they don’t.
From the scripted TV shenanigans of the Monkees to the charming folkiness of One Direction, as long as there are junior high school notebooks to deface, there will be outfits providing pop spectacle in its purist, least filtered form.Īs music has evolved, so have boy bands. Irresistibly catchy, unapologetically inauthentic, sexy and they know it - the boy band is the most fabulously pre-fab of all musical outfits.