Martin Luther King and Marvin Gaye still show us the wayBy Kevin Dayhoff
Posted on
http://www.explorecarroll.com/ 1/14/09
For those who remember the push-button, dashboard AM radios in your cars in the 1960s, you may want to sit down before your read another word.
Last Monday was the 50th anniversary of the creation of Motown Records.
If you remember listening to Diana Ross and The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Vandellas, The Miracles, The Commodores, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder on WCAO, congratulations ... you are getting old.
I'm not sure what the format of WCAO is these days, but during the 1960s and well into the 1970s, it was a popular "Top 40" station in Baltimore. In fact, WCAO was one of the first radio stations in Maryland. It began broadcasting in 1922.
By the 1960s, WCAO played a little bit of everything, from The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, Steppinwolf and Cream to The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, Glen Campbell and Percy Sledge.
However, my fondest memories are those that recall the Motown sound.
Berry Gordy, according to a "Morning Edition" segment on NPR by Ashley Kahn, was a songwriter and a former boxer when he started the record company on Jan. 12, 1959. It was first called "Tamla Records," but a year later was incorporated as Motown Record Corp.
He started it all with "an $800 loan from his family," according to a Sky News article, "Fifty Years of Motown Celebrated."
The article also noted: "Motown is seen as playing an important role in the racial integration of popular music. It was the first record label owned by an African-American to primarily feature African-American artists who achieved crossover success ...
"Gordy first signed The Matadors, who later changed their name to The Miracles, with their singer William 'Smokey' Robinson becoming the label's vice-president."
Gordy, who is now 79 years old, sold the company in 1988 for $61 million. Not a bad profit from that $800 investment.
Kahn writes that Robinson remembers the day Motown began.
"There were five people there. Berry Gordy said that day, 'We are not going to make black music. We are going to make music for everybody. We are going to make music that has great stories and great beats. We are going to write great songs.' "
And that's just what they did. They wrote great music that people love to this day. Kahn places the origins of the Motown sound into some historical context: "For black America, the 1960s were a decade filled with social protest and raw emotion -- especially in cities like Detroit. And yet this urban center produced uplifting songs of love."
This point was driven home by Jordan: "At Motown, 95 percent of the songs were written by young, black men. ... They wrote for the male and female artists, and brought to it a sense of vulnerability any English professor would be proud of. Coming out of Detroit, one of the harshest environments you could imagine, they elected to write love songs."
Perhaps as we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, we can stop and ponder the words of Marvin Gaye from "What's Going On":
"For only love can conquer hate,
You know you've got to find a way,
To bring some understanding here today ...
Talk to me so you can see,
Oh what's going on ..."
Kevin Dayhoff writes from Westminster. E-mail him at kdayhoff AT carr DOT org.
http://explorecarroll.com/opinion/2080/martin-luther-king-marvin-gaye-still-show-us-way/
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Ten Years After: 50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain
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