By Anita Stewart, Managing Editor (Retired)
September 10, 2026
In the early morning hours, when the rest of Detroit was asleep, 2648 West Grand Boulevard was still humming. In a cramped studio the musicians called “the Snakepit,” a house band was cutting the songs that would define a generation. The building looked like any other on the block — a modest two-story home with a porch and a sign out front that read “Hitsville U.S.A.” Inside, Berry Gordy was running the most successful Black-owned business in America like a Ford assembly line.
Gordy had, in fact, worked on the Ford line as Detroit was the home of the automobile industry and the auto factories and union benefits had made many in the city enjoy their middle class living and their portion of the American Dream. He took that logic from the factories and assembly lines — stations, specialization, quality control — and applied it to pop music.
Songs moved through a pipeline: songwriters wrote them, the house band cut the tracks, artists overdubbed vocals, and every Friday, Gordy held a meeting where each new recording was weighed against whatever was topping the charts that week. A track that couldn’t compete was sent back to be redone or it was shelved. To keep the royalties in-house, Motown published its own songs through Jobete Music, named after his children Hazel Joy, Berry, and Terry.
The bet that started it all was an $800 loan from a family savings club. On January 12, 1959, Berry Gordy Jr. — “Berry,” not “Barry” — founded Tamla Records; the Motown Record Corporation followed in April 1960. He was 29, a former boxer and record-store owner with a string of failed ventures behind him and a teenage songwriter named Smokey Robinson urging him to start his own label. Gordy bought the West Grand Boulevard house for his headquarters. By 1964, it had become the largest and most successful independent record company in the United States.
The machine behind the sound
Motown’s secret was less about its singers than the power of the machinery behind them. The Artists Development Department, run by Maxine Powell in the mid-1960’s, was a “finishing school” that taught the Temptations, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and others how to dress, move, and handle interviews — a polish designed to cross over to white audiences and defy the racial stereotypes of the era.
Then there was the house band, the Funk Brothers — a rotating cast of more than 50 Detroit nightclub and jazz musicians who played on the overwhelming majority of Motown’s recordings from 1959 until the label left Detroit in 1972. Bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin were the engine. They never received credit on the records; they were, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “unseen but not heard.”
The writers behind the singers
Here is the part that surprises people. Most of the biggest Motown hits were not written by the singers who made them famous. They were written and produced by a small stable of in-house writer-producers, working in competition with one another, feeding the pipeline.
William “Smokey” Robinson was the first of them — the teenager who had pushed Gordy to start the label. As front-man and chief songwriter of the Miracles, he was Motown’s first true creative auteur, and he wrote or co-wrote for other artists too — most famously “My Girl,” which he handed off to the Temptations who made it a hit.
If Robinson was the poet, Holland-Dozier-Holland was the hit factory. Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland teamed up in 1963, and over the next four years they wrote and produced nearly all of the Supremes’ and Four Tops’ biggest records — songs like “Where Did Our Love Go” and “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” By one count they accounted for 25 No. 1 hits before leaving Motown in 1967 over royalty disputes.
Into that breach stepped Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. Strong was the same singer who had cut “Money (That’s What I Want),” one of Motown’s earliest hits, in 1959. Together he and Whitfield pioneered a darker, socially conscious strain that came to be called “psychedelic soul,” best heard on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” which won three Grammys at the 1973 awards, including Best R&B Song.
Finally, there were Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, the duo Gordy brought in to replace the departing H-D-H. Paired with Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, they wrote and produced nearly the entire late-1960’s duet catalog, including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
Even the eventual auteurs came out of this system. Marvin Gaye clashed with Gordy to release the self-produced “What’s Going On” in 1971, a song Gordy had rejected as “too political;” Gaye refused to record anything else until it came out. Stevie Wonder, signed as a child prodigy, let his contract lapse on his 21st birthday and leveraged interest from rival labels to win full creative control and ownership of his own publishing. Both transformed themselves from interpreters of other writers’ songs into artists who wrote their own.
Who really wrote the hits?
From Detroit to today
Detroit was not incidental to the Motown story — the label was literally named after the city, “Motor Town.” The industrial discipline of the auto plants gave Gordy his model; the city’s Black churches, jazz and blues clubs, and doo-wop corners supplied the talent.
So it cut deep when, on June 14, 1972, Motown announced it was moving all operations to Los Angeles. Gordy had already been drawn west by the film and television businesses. Most of the Funk Brothers did not make the move, and the Detroit era — the classic Motown Sound — effectively ended, though the final session logged at 2648 West Grand is dated August 30, 1973. It was officially the end of a very productive era.
Gordy sold the label to MCA and Boston Ventures in 1988 for $61 million; today Motown Records is owned by Universal Music Group, operating under the Capitol Music Group umbrella. Its catalog remains a formidable commercial asset.
But the original house still stands. In 1985, Gordy’s sister Esther Gordy Edwards turned 2648 West Grand Boulevard into the Motown Museum, preserving Studio A exactly as it was when the Funk Brothers worked it overnight. A $70 million expansion, “The Motown Experience,” is expected to open in December 2026, adding nearly 40,000 square feet of exhibition and performance space.
Berry Gordy, now in his nineties, built the most successful Black-owned business of his era — and, in doing so, packaged and distributed a crossover pop-soul sound that helped break down the racial barriers of American music. The singers are who we remember. The writers are who made it work. And the music we still hear from that era is unforgettable!
Want to relive Motown Days? Go see the Hitsville NEXT Revue
The Hitsville NEXT Revue is a signature live performance production by the Motown Museum that showcases Detroit’s next generation of emerging artists and pays tribue to the historic Motortown Revue.
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