Podcasts about marvin gay

藝術，來自人心，始終人性，感動人情。二十年的台灣人生，瑞典藝術畫家 Hellen Söderberg 海倫··索德伯格 沒有錯過任何感官的機會，雜貨店裡隨時找到的臨時口譯，街道上友善親切的問候，台北高樓間豁然的老房子，古董收納櫃油漆剝落的拉門，太魯閣阿里山壯觀秀麗的山谷，社區協助外國移民籌募活動，生活點滴出現的人們都成了她創作的動力。Hellen 把這些邂垢用後火車站批發貨架上找到的緞帶貼紙彩紙點綴在照片上變成了一幅幅美麗的剪貼畫作，吸引一群群喜歡手作的同好。五年前在朋友的派對上驚艷繪畫的魔力，迸發出了另一個意想不到的藝術創作共創，Hellen 的藝術磁性從天母到士林，創立了咖啡藝廊，四年下來已經有四十位藝術家加入輪流共展。年初剛回到瑞典，還在收拾整理她不捨台灣的心和情，她始終可以從畫作裡看到台灣的姐妹們，和留在台灣的心情。Culture beyond Time and Space.  Being lived in Taiwan for 20 years, Hellen Söderberg is now back to her first homeland.  From a children's TV show host and a drama scriptwriter in Stockholm, Hellen left to an unknown world she had never anticipated.  Taiwan becomes a cradle for her explosive talent on creativity.  Taiwanese people's kindness, curiosity and interests to the foreigner, Taiwanese rustic worn-out paint antique cabinet door, Taiwanese mountain range scenery, the handicraft wholesale shop's ribbons, and even a friend's surprise party, all shapes colour, texture, and creative process on canvas.  Coming back to Sweden, she brings back 20-year and tons of life memories, faces, and lots of love from her Taiwanese sisters, soul friends and Taiwan.～～～ Photos：Hellen SöderbergHellen 和聽眾分享的音樂：Ain't no mountain high enough by Marvin Gay & Tammi Terrell～～～The upcoming exhibitions 近期畫展:Staffliets vänner at Kulturvaket during Sollentuna's Culture FestivalMay 6 | 4:00 PM–8:15 PMStallbacken, SollentunaGroup Exhibition – Ateljéföreningen EdsvikDates: May 31, June 1, 6, 7, and 8Location: Stallbacken Hellen 的網站連結hellensoderberg.cominstagram.com/art_by_sodiHellen's scrapbooking: facebook.com/scrapmoment2000And of course Hellen's "Things with faces" on FB 臉書. facebook.com/groups/172611462875426

Reasonable Ignorance is joined by Dallas reporter Chris Henderson

Das Konzeptalbum der Superlative. 9 Gefühlsausbrüche in Soul, Jazz und Klassik über die USA der frühen 70er Jahre. Anklagen gegen Korruption, Krieg und soziale Ungerechtigkeit. Und die bittere Wahrheit. 50 Jahre später hat sich nicht geändert.

HERE WE GO MY SHOW FOR 14-NOV-2024 WITH A MIXED BAG OF OLD CLASSICS INCLUDING ( EARTH WIND & FIRE, WEBSTER LEWIS, JUICY, DENNIS EDWARDS, JEAN CARN, BREAKWATER, STEVIE WONDER, MELBA MOORE  ) AND MANY MORE ALSO SOME TOP NEW TRACKS FROM ( LOUISE MEHAN/KATHY KOSINS, JULIAN JONAH/ROBBY LOVE, MATHER ) WE ALSO HAVE THE CONNOISSEURS CORNER ( THIS WEEK WE HAVE  TRACKS FROM HIROSHI FUKUMURA AND B BAKER CHOCOLATE CO  ) AND WE HAVE THE BACK TO BACK CLASSICS BY A CLASSIC ARTIST (THIS WEEK WE HAVE TWO TRACKS FROM PHYLLIS HYMAN ) THEN WE HAVE THREE TRACKS DUG OUT FROM THE GARAGE FROM MARVIN GAY & TAMMI TERRELL TWO SONGS , MARVIN GAY & KIM WESTON ) FINNISHING OF WITH A COUPLE OF SLOW TRACKS AND MUCH MUCH MORE SIT BACK WITH A GLASS OF SOMETHING AND ENJOY OR DOWNLOAD FOR LATER

The District Creatives Radio Show is a 30-minute program featuring interviews highlighting the work of millennials/young adult creatives in the city. The focus of the content is arts, entertainment, and the creative economy. “The District Creatives Radio Show” provides a platform for creatives to share the work and content they provide in this city and for the city. Hosted by District creative, Savvy Cherise, the show will create a dialogue around the joys and pains of pursuing your passion, resources for District creatives, and balancing your passion project with your paycheck. These discussions will not only highlight current creatives but also guide the next wave of creatives in the District of Columbia.

HERE WE GO MY SHOW FOR 20-JUNE-2024 WITH A MIXED BAG OF OLD CLASSICS INCLUDING ( DEBRA LAWS, ARCHIE BELL AND THE DRELLS, KENI STEVENS, MARVIN GAY, TANIA MARIA, LISA STANSFIELD, CAVIAR) AND MANY MORE ALSO SOME TOP NEW TRACKS FROM (  PRO UNO, SHAUN LABELLE, MATHER, GEORGIE B & THE GROOVE ASSOCIATION  ) WE ALSO HAVE THE CONNOISSEURS CORNER ( THIS WEEK WE HAVE FREDDIE HUBBARD AND BRIAN SIMPSON ) AND WE HAVE THE BACK TO BACK CLASSICS BY A CLASSIC ARTIST (THIS WEEK WE HAVE TWO TRACKS FROM ANGELA BOFILL WHO WE SADLY LOST LAST WEEK ) THEN WE HAVE THREE TRACKS DUG OUT FROM THE GARAGE FROM (JUDY CLAY & WILLIAM BELL, CARLA THOMAS AND THE DRIFTERS ) FINNISHING OF WITH A COUPLE OF SLOW TRACKS AND MUCH MUCH MORE SIT BACK WITH A GLASS OF SOMETHING AND ENJOY OR DOWNLOAD FOR LATER

De ce chanteur mythique, Marvin Gaye, on connaît tous ses titres incontournables What's Going On, Let's Get it On… Mais que sait-on vraiment de sa vie marquée par la drogue, la violence, et la haine envers son père ? Dans cette nouvelle saison de Home(icides), Caroline Nogueras vous raconte le destin tragique de Marvin Gaye, le prince de la soul. Dans le dernier épisode, Caroline Nogueras reçoit Frédéric Adrian, journaliste et auteur d'une biographie de Marvin Gaye. Une enfance traumatisante Durant toute leur vie, la relation entre Marvin père et Marvin fils a été extrêmement tumultueuse. Alors que le patriarche jalouse le talent et le succès de son fils, Marvin junior n'attend que l'approbation et l'amour de son père jusqu'à cette journée tragique la veille de ses 45 ans. Le père, alcoolique, le fils, cocaïnomane. Unis dans l'addiction, dans le prénom, dans la ferveur et la dévotion spirituelle et pourtant, si différents. Toute sa vie, Marvin Gay senior a fait vivre un enfer à son fils… qui, pour se protéger, s'est réfugié dans la musique. Découvrez la saison précédente en intégralité : Simone Weber, une grand-mère diabolique  Un podcast Bababam Originals Ecrit par Capucine Lebot et raconté par Caroline Nogueras Réalisé par Julien Roussel En partenariat avec upday.  Date de première diffusion : 19 juin 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

HERE WE GO MY SHOW FOR 02-MAY-2024 WITH A MIXED BAG OF OLD CLASSICS INCLUDING ( THE OJAYS, CARL ANDERSON, SWEET CHARLES, THE STRIKERS, MICHAEL COOPER, MELISA MORGAN, THE DETROIT SPINNERS) AND MANY MORE ALSO SOME TOP NEW TRACKS FROM (  ERICA FALLS, BILLY BROWN, DOWN TO EARTH  ) WE ALSO HAVE THE CONNOISSEURS CORNER ( THIS WEEK WE HAVE SIMON LE GREC AND HOUSE OF JAZZ ) AND WE HAVE THE BACK TO BACK CLASSICS BY A CLASSIC ARTIST (THIS WEEK WE HAVE HOWARD JOHNSON ) THEN WE HAVE THREE TRACKS DUG OUT FROM THE GARAGE FROM (SMOKEY ROBINSON & THE MIRACLES, FRANK WILSON, MARVIN GAY & TAMMI TERRELL ) FINNISHING OF WITH A COUPLE OF SLOW TRACKS AND MUCH MUCH MORE SIT BACK WITH A GLASS OF SOMETHING AND ENJOY OR DOWNLOAD FOR LATER

Natif de Los Angeles, Aceyalone a grandi au son de la funk, du blues et de Marvin Gay. À l'âge de 13 ans, il découvre la culture hip-hop et devient fan du rappeur  RUN. Une anecdote raconte sa rencontre avec RUN DMC, accompagné de son complice Myka 9, où les deux gamins ont osé défier les stars du rap lors de leur  tournée à Los Angeles. Cet esprit de compétition devient l'un des moteurs d'Aceyalone, l'amenant à exceller dans l'art du freestyle, faisant de lui une figure emblématique de l'underground californien.Vers la fin des années 80, Aceyalone s'associe à Myka 9, PEACE et Self Jupiter pour former le groupe Freestyle Fellowship, à l'origine de deux albums cultes, "To Whom It May Concern" et "Innercity Griots". Leur réputation s'est solidifiée au Good Life Café, un lieu emblématique au cœur de South Central, ayant réussi, au début des années 90, à transformer dans un quartier marqué par la violence, un café en un endroit neutre où seuls le processus créatif et le talent sont pris en compte. Les règles y sont strictes : seuls les plus talentueux survivent.Le Good Life Café est devenu une véritable institution du rap, où la contribution d'Aceyalone a joué un rôle majeur. Il a su se distinguer en développant un style de flow unique qui a influencé directement ou indirectement des artistes tels que Kendrick Lamar, Busta Rhymes, Bones Thugs and Harmony, mais aussi plus près de chez nous un groupe comme TTC. Il était donc logique pour nos Dj's de proposer ce mix sur Aceaylone, un artiste qui devrait être plus souvent cité dans l'histoire de cette foutue musique.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

HERE WE GO MY SHOW FOR 08-FEB-2024 WITH A MIXED BAG OF OLD CLASSICS INCLUDING ( RHZE, HARVEY MASON, MARVIN GAY,FAT LARRY'S BAND, RANDY ROBERTS/RICHARD BURTON, MISTIC MERLIN) AND MANY MORE ALSO SOME TOP NEW TRACKS FROM (  LEEE JOHN AND BILL SHARP, MAIMI HEAT, CAMERA SOUL, D'Z ft BEN MATHEWS ) WE ALSO HAVE THE CONNOISSEURS CORNER ( THIS WEEK WE HAVE WILTON FELDER AND CUBAN JAZZ COMBO ) AND WE HAVE THE BACK TO BACK CLASSICS BY A CLASSIC ARTIST (THIS WEEK WE HAVE BRASS CONSTRUCTION ) THEN WE HAVE THREE TRACKS DUG OUT FROM THE GARAGE FROM (THE ISLEY BROTHERS, THE TEMPTATIONS, MARTHA REEVES AND THE VANDELLAS ) FINNISHING OF WITH A COUPLE OF SLOW TRACKS AND MUCH MUCH MORE SIT BACK WITH A GLASS OF SOMETHING AND ENJOY OR DOWNLOAD FOR LATER

HERE WE GO TWO HOURS OF QUALITY TUNES FOR YOUR LISTENING DELIGHT INCLUDING ( WALTER JACKSON, PAPRIKA SOUL, EARTH WIND & FIRE, AL WILSON, PHYLLIS HYMAN, SADE, MARVIN GAY, THE FOUR TOPS, CHARME ) AND MANY MORE HOPE YOU LIXE OR DOWNLOAD FOR LATER WITH A GLASS OF SOMETHING XXXXX

A concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28th and 29th, 1964 which would be released as a concert film called the T.A.M.I. Show.  Free tickets were provided for local high school students to provide the audience.  T.A.M.I. stands for either “Teenage Awards Music International” or “Teen Age Music International,” as both were used by the show's publicity team.  The show included many of the top rock and roll and R&B musicians of the time, including the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Chuck Berry, and The Miracles.  Jan and Dean were the emcees for the event.  Motown Records was represented by three of its biggest acts in the Miracles, Marvin Gay, and the Supremes.  The Rolling Stones were featured as the grand finale.  However, the performance by James Brown and the Famous Flames is perhaps the highlight of the show, as it features his dance moves at the height of his career.  Steve Binder and his personnel from The Steve Allen Show shot the film, and the legendary session musicians of The Wrecking Crew provided most of the instrumentation.  The go-go dancers in the background were choreographed by David Winters and his assistant, a young Toni Basil.This is a difficult film to locate due to copyright disputes on the show over the years.  You'll need to go to YouTube to find the performances.Wayne takes us through this concert footage of the early days of rock and roll. (Here They Come) from All Over the World by Jan and DeanThe film starts with a song from Jan and Dean which is played over the credits.  Jan and Dean co-hosted the concert and contributed this anthem written for the show.  It has a surfing vibe and is easily confused for The Beach Boys who also participated in the concert.Hey Little Bird by The BarbariansThe Barbarians were a precursor to the Punk movement, and their style was called garage rock in the day.  The Barbarians had a one-handed drummer who utilized a drum stick in his left arm with a hook prosthetic.  The group sported a pirate look with leather sandals, open necked shirts, and bloused sleeves.Out of Sight by James Brown and the Famous FlamesMany consider the highlight of the show to be James Brown's performance, as it showcases his dance moves.  The energy shown by Brown and his backing singers clearly influenced future acts like Michael Jackson and Prince.Around and Around by The Rolling StonesWhile the Rolling Stones were the final act, Keith Richards claims that choosing to follow James Brown on stages was the worst decision of their careers, because no matter how well they performed, they couldn't top him.  They performed a cover of Chuck Berry's song - an interesting choice since Berry was also a performer for the concert. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Do the Clam by Elvis Presley (from the motion picture “Girl Happy”)Elvis was making movies at the time, and would almost always be expected to sing songs in the picture. STAFF PICKS:Nowhere to Run by Martha & the VandellasBruce leads off the staff picks with a group which would see a name change to Martha Reeves & the Vandellas later on.  This Motown hit written by the legendary team called Holland-Dozier-Holland went to number 8 on the US charts.  The song is about a woman trapped in a downward spiraling love affair that she just can't give up.Land of 1000 Dances by Cannibal and the HeadhuntersRob features an iteration of a frequently covered song.  Chris Kenner originally recorded it in 1962, but it was more successful as a cover by Cannibal & the Headhunters, going to number 30 on the Billboard chart.  They also added the "na na na na na" hook to the original when front man Frankie Garcia forgot the lyrics.  Sixteen dances are mentioned in the lyrics of the song.Eight Days a Week by The Beatles Lynch brings us an early hit penned by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  It would be the seventh number one single for the Fab Four in the United States, despite Lennon's feeling that it was a failed attempt at writing a single.  The title is attributed to a statement Ringo Starr made regarding how busy the Beatles were at the time.Satisfied by Lulu and the LuvversWayne wraps up the staff picks with a high energy party song from a Scottish band.  Lulu would go on to a successful solo career that included film songs like "To Sir With Love," and the title song for "The Man with the Golden Gun."  Lulu was 17 at the time this song came out.  She would go on to marry Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees.   INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Cast Your Fate to the Wind by Sounds OrchestralThis week's podcast ends with an instrumental song

At a time when so much divides us, music like fictional books, television and movies are one of those things that tends to bring us together, Dani and Colton and their group NI/CO, have put a focus on what ties us together as partners in life and in music.In 2016, Colton and Dani began writing and within two years they had a body of work that they released their first single which was a creative spin on Marvin Gay's, What's Going On. Eventually, they moved to Los Angeles where they've become well known for their work producing music videos and songs both as cover artists and for their own work. They have also created songs written with producers in Nashville, Los Angeles and London and have been featured on several top Spotify playlists and have appeared on various music networks including the CW Network, VH1, BET and Freeform, featured in promos for The Today Show, the World of Dance and advertising campaigns for Spotify and Ralph Lauren.They've been entrepreneurial in their efforts doing everything from building custom wedding playlists, creating custom covers, creating their own music and performing.Follow along with Dani and Colton on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and find their music here.Learn more by visiting our website and follow along with us on Instagram.

Sie ist Deutschlands bekannteste Soul- und R&B-Sängerin. Joy Denalane über die Liebe, Männer in ihren Konzerten und Fußball. Joy Denalane eine der bekanntesten Sängerinnen Deutschlands. Ihr Ehemann ist Max Herre, Rapper, Songwriter und lange Zeit Mitglied der Hip-Hop-Formation Freundeskreis. Sie ist in Berlin geboren, ihr Vater war Südafrikaner, die Mutter Deutsche. Im Jahr 2020 präsentierte sie ihr Studioalbum »Let Yourself Be Loved« welches beim US-Label Motown erschien, wo Künstler und Künstlerinnen wie Marvin Gay, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson oder Diana Ross unter Vertrag standen. Joy Denalane war die erste Deutsche, der das gelungen ist. Anfang Oktober veröffentlicht sie ihr neues Album »Willpower«. Ihre künstlerische Karriere begann sie Ende der Neunzigerjahre in dem menschenfreundlichen Hippie-Rap-Kollektiv Freundeskreis. Ihr Solo-Debüt »Mamani« aus dem Jahr 2002, kann man als das erste deutsche Soul-Album betrachten, das diesen Namen verdient. Im Podcast mit Host Juan Moreno spricht Denalane übers Songschreiben, ihr großes Lebensthema »Liebe« und warum sie nicht verstehen kann, warum ihre Musikerkollegen mit Fußball die Welt erklären. Moreno+1 ist der Interview-Podcast des SPIEGEL mit Juan Moreno. Für alle, die neugierig auf gute Gespräche sind. Jeden Mittwoch neu. Hinweise und Gästewünsche gerne an moreno+1@spiegel.de. +++ Alle Rabattcodes und Infos zu unseren Werbepartnern finden Sie hier: https://linktr.ee/morenoplus1 ++++++ Alle Infos zu unseren Werbepartnern finden Sie hier. Die SPIEGEL-Gruppe ist nicht für den Inhalt dieser Seite verantwortlich. +++ Alle SPIEGEL Podcasts finden Sie hier. Mehr Hintergründe zum Thema erhalten Sie bei SPIEGEL+. Jetzt für nur € 1,- für die ersten vier Wochen testen unter spiegel.de/abonnieren Informationen zu unserer Datenschutzerklärung.

This week's show, after a small 1969 Mann/Weil warble: brand new Ash, Damned, Triptides, Once For Kicks, Bird Streets, Clientele, and sparkle*jets U.K., plus The Beatles, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Slade, Leroy Van Dyke, Marvin Gay...

De ce chanteur mythique, Marvin Gaye, on connaît tous ses titres incontournables What's Going On, Let's Get it On… Mais que sait-on vraiment de sa vie marquée par la drogue, la violence, et la haine envers son père ? Dans cette nouvelle saison de Home(icides), Caroline Nogueras vous raconte le destin tragique de Marvin Gaye, le prince de la soul. Dans le dernier épisode, Caroline Nogueras reçoit Frédéric Adrian, journaliste et auteur d'une biographie de Marvin Gaye. Une enfance traumatisante Durant toute leur vie, la relation entre Marvin père et Marvin fils a été extrêmement tumultueuse. Alors que le patriarche jalouse le talent et le succès de son fils, Marvin junior n'attend que l'approbation et l'amour de son père jusqu'à cette journée tragique la veille de ses 45 ans. Le père, alcoolique, le fils, cocaïnomane. Unis dans l'addiction, dans le prénom, dans la ferveur et la dévotion spirituelle et pourtant, si différents. Toute sa vie, Marvin Gay senior a fait vivre un enfer à son fils… qui, pour se protéger, s'est réfugié dans la musique. Découvrez la saison précédente en intégralité : André Kaas, le veuf accusé à tort Un podcast Bababam Originals Ecrit par Capucine Lebot et raconté par Caroline Nogueras Réalisé par Julien Roussel En partenariat avec upday.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessica recaps the Warriors Game 2 win over the Lakers, talks to Lang Whitaker about the end of the Grizzlies season, looks at some potential A.I. generated Jessica Benson Show mascots and more.start shenanigans:09 Warriors even up series 1-1:23 Lang Whitaker:28 Alabama fires baseball coach:35 Coach Bud fired by Bucks:41 End of Grizzlies season :52 CJ's surprise/Jessica Benson Show Mascots1:21 Ed Sheeran wins Marvin Gay lawsuit1:23 Katy Perry and Lionel Richie to perform at King Charles' coronation1:30 DOUBLE TAP

What's going on beautiful people , get ready for another exciting episode of The Kasabian Lavoe Show! We have a packed show for you today, featuring a variety of stories from around the world. Keep an eye out for CBD stores on the strip and Fremont that's not weed . As we dive into some interesting news about the world of cannabis. We also bring you a bizarre story about an old couple in Hawaii who drove into the water, and explore the latest on Biden's re-election campaign. Additionally, we have updates on Disney World's move to a new location, news of another bank closure, and a review of the hit TV show Bad Boys Club. But that's not all! We also have details on 50 Cent's new recording studio, Tre Songs, along with fiery drama at the upcoming Billy vs. Ja Rule fight, and a controversial debate about Ed Sheeran vs. Marvin Gay. Finally, we discuss the recent fentanyl epidemic in San Francisco, and the state guard's involvement in combating it. So don't go anywhere, sit back, relax, and let's dive into The Kasabian Lavoe Show!

You know what it is! A few of the Recs on here are some of the first records I ever owned 23 years ago. Its funny to me that are parents listen to Rolling Stones and Marvin Gay for their oldies. Where I will listen to Ragga Jungle anthems for my oldies.  Every time I play these records I feel a deep feeling of joy, nastalgia, and Metal as Fuck!Big Up all the old school Jungliest. You are all a bunch of Geezers! Stay Tuned, DJ Panther  Support the show

Please join us Right Now, January 23, 2023 at 11:00AM PST as Actress, Producer Melissa Chambers, Actress Paula Rebelo and Actor Marvin Gay joins host Ron Brewington on "The Actor's Choice."

Day 15 The Address: 2648 W Grand Blvd, Detroit, Michigan, Hitsville,USA The Story: We dare you to try and make a top 10 Motown favorites list. We dare you. You'd have to narrow down Stevie Wonder's entire catalog. You'd have to choose between solo Michael or The Jackson Five. You'd have to debate who was better: Lionel Richie, Marvin Gay, or Smokie Robinson. You'd have to make some seriously tough choices. There are just too many hits! We're talking iconic, era-defining, hits. What started on Grand Boulevard in Motor City is a legacy that has transformed the world, defined music as we know it today, and given us a list of classics so long that it's safe to say there will never be another influence as powerful as that of Hitsville, USA. Leave everything you think you know about this story behind. We're going deep into the crates for some trivia and shocking facts!

Wally Amos built, sold, worked for, and quit. He got brought back and might have got a return on the final sale just because he liked baking cookies. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is ... Well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients, so here's one of those. [Tapper's Jewelry Ad] Dave Young: Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. I'm Dave young, and I'm alongside Stephen Semple. And Stephen, you got the story today of another cookie guy, another famous cookie. This one's really famous. Stephen Semple: Totally. Dave Young: Totally famous. Famous Amos. Stephen Semple: Famous Amos. Yeah. So Famous Amos Cookies was started by Wally Amos on March 9th, 1975 on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. And here's what's really interesting. It is the first, it was the first cookie store in history, and this story is... There's a lot to it. There's success. There's decline. There's return. There's so much going on here that I really don't know what to say other than it's really interesting journey that we're going to go on. Dave Young: Lots of chapters in the Famous Amos story. When you say the first cookie store, like all the others were just like a bakery where it was other things besides cookies? Cookies, they also had. Stephen Semple: Right. Yeah. This is the first one where it was just cookies and that was it. It even predates another podcast we did, which was Mrs. Fields' Cookies. It even predates Mrs. Fields by a couple of years. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So first cookie store in history, and it's a really interesting journey because Wally went to school to study to be a secretary. Dave Young: Really? Stephen Semple: Yeah, and the first job he got was in the mail room of the William Morris Talent Agency, which is one of the top talent agencies in the world. He worked his way up, and he became the first black talent manager. First one, so he was really groundbreaking on that. And he reached a point where he decided he wanted to leave the agency and set up his own agency to manage his own clients, but this new agency he started was really struggling, and he would go home at the end of the days and he'd feel frankly depressed, and he wanted to feel good about things. So at the end of the day, he would go home and he baked cookies at night. And he'd baked these chocolate chip pecan cookies like his aunt made. Dave Young: As one do. Stephen Semple: And he really did this to self soothe. It was never a business idea. It was something he did to make himself feel good. Dave Young: Just made some cookies. Stephen Semple: Made some cookies and he'd bring them back to the office. And when clients were in, he'd give them to clients. And one day light goes off. He said, "The one thing that makes me happy is making cookies. Why don't I start this as a business?" He gets on the phone. He calls old clients. He gets an investment from Marvin Gay and a bunch of others. He raises $25,000 from these well known musicians and decides I'm going to start this business. So in March of 1975, he opens the first shop dedicated the cookies in the world called Famous Amos Cookies. Dave Young: Famous Amos Cookies. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: I love the fact that the cookies were a form of therapy for him. I mean, it's like a Ted Lasso moment, isn't it? It's... Stephen Semple: It sort of is. Yeah. Yeah. And so he opens it up in this highly visible location in Los Angeles on the seedy, because at the time very seedy Sunset Boulevard was full of runwa...

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 5, Why did the Caterpillar Cross the Road? To get to the Artillery Range. A story about the metamorphosis of a prison into a butterfly rearing facility for endangered species recovery. This episode is all about the Sustainability in Prisons Project's (SPP) Taylor's Checkerspot Butterfly Program. In this episode, we learn more about the program with Mary Linders, endangered species biologist and we talk with Liz Louie, former butterfly technician, about her experience rearing Taylor's checkerspot butterflies. This season is all about the Sustainability in Prisons Project (otherwise referred to as SPP), how they bring education, nature and training into the prisons to reduce recidivism and protect and enhance our environment. This season (we now know) is 7 episodes long. In the first episode we got into how it all started; Episode 2 provided a background on the prison system and an introduction to SPP. Episode 3 was all about partnerships, which is really what SPP is, a network of partners working to bring education and nature into the prison system. Last episode provided an overview of the Conservation Programs at SPP and then we got into more of the details of the Conservation Nursery Programs and how they are involved in prairie restoration.We start off the episode with a few fun facts, including:A group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope, although sometimes referred to as a flutter, flight or swarm. A group of caterpillars is called an army.According to the Smithsonian: There are about 18,500 butterfly species worldwide (except Antarctica). Of those, around 750 are found in the US.Interviewees this EpisodeMary LindersMary has worked as an endangered species recovery biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) since 1994. For the past 18 years she has worked to protect and recover populations of five at-risk prairie and oak-associated species in the South Puget Sound region. As the lead biologist overseeing captive rearing and population re-establishment of the federally endangered Taylor's checkerspot butterfly, Mary has grown the project from a captive rearing test trial to a program with two captive rearing facilities, 14 field sites, and nine conservation partners. All told, this effort is transforming 1000s of acres of degraded grassland to high quality native prairie benefitting a multitude of other species. Mary holds a Master's degree in Wildlife Science from the University of Washington-Seattle and a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Liz LouieLiz is currently the manager of the FareStart Restaurant Program. She was previously a butterfly technician with the Taylor's Checkerspot Butterfly Rearing program. According to their website, “FareStart transforms lives, disrupts poverty and nourishes communities through food, life skills and job training.” We hope to have a future mini-sode where we share more about Liz's experience with the FareStart Program. Stay tuned for more info on that!Taylor's Checkerspot ButterflyAccording to the WDFW Website:“Taylor's checkerspot is a Pacific Northwest endemic butterfly. It is currently restricted to a small scattering of 8 populations in Washington, a single population in British Columbia, and 2 populations in Oregon. The decline of this butterfly has accompanied the loss of open, prairie and grassland habitats…it has declined dramatically due to widespread habitat degradation and loss of prairie-oak ecosystems from development, invasive species, and loss of beneficial disturbance mechanisms. Habitat enhancement efforts for Taylor's checkerspot since 2006 have been significant, however, the amount of fully-restored habitat relative to need is low, and the configuration of habitat remains fragmented and isolated.”TAYLOR'S CHECKERSPOT BUTTERFLY ON BALSAMROOT - PHOTO CREDIT: USFWS/K. REAGANTaylor's Checkerspot was listed as an endangered species by the Washington State Fish and Wildlife Commission in 2006, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada in 2011, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013. The federal listing means that basically that no harm can come of the butterfly.Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) includes the largest remaining intact prairie (which happens to be a live artillery range) in the South Salish Sea Basin. The artillery impact area at JBLM contains some of the highest quality prairies in the Pacific Northwest and some of the few remaining natural populations of Taylor's checkerspot butterflies. Out of all of the glacial outwash prairie that previously existed there is only 3% remaining and of that, JBLM is home to about 95%. If you want to learn more about butterfly identification in the South Salish lowlands, check out, A Region Specific Guide to Butterflies of South Puget Sound, Washington.The Cascadia Prairie Oak Partnership has a lot of great resources related to prairie oak restoration in the Salish Sea basin and Willamette Valley, including various field and landowner guides.WDFW asks that you share Taylor's checkerspot butterfly observations on their WDFW wildlife reporting form. Providing detailed information such as a photo and the coordinates will improve the confidence and value of your observation.Taylor's Checkerspot Butterfly ProgramIn this episode, Mary Linders shares more about the Taylor's Checkerspot Butterfly Program. She talks about their lifecycle and their unique ecological niche within the Salish Lowland Prairies. The ultimate goal of the program is to rear butterflies to be reintroduced into the wild to help restore the few remaining native populations. The easiest way to do that is to try to reduce their mortality in captivity. Mary says that one of the biggest challenges to rearing Taylor's checkerspot butterflies is weather. On the habitat side, it means that they may or may not get green up after a fire, or germination, which is impacted by weather and management techniques. While on the butterfly side of things, it is very plastic in its behavior to the climate; if there is an early spring, it will shift its flight habits.We learn that in the wild, the Taylor's checkerspot butterfly has a survival rate of 1-5% from egg to adult, while in captivity they see about a 65% survival rate. They try to keep every stage at 90% survival rate.While GPS and GIS have not been used on the incarcerated side, Mary does share how GIS and GPS are used for all aspects of conservation from habitat assessments to recording release locations and tracking movement.This project is having an impact on species recovery. Where they were down to a single population, they have now established two other populations and there is a third that is doing okay. There are also a couple of sites that have not fully taken off yet.Mary discusses some of the benefits of bringing a project like this into a prison setting. One of the benefits is that you get an intimate look at captivity and another is that they have been very successful at minimizing mortality in captivity. She says one of the drawbacks of having a program like this in a prison is that it is a very dynamic situation, where you might face lockdowns or other circumstances that might not happen outside of prison. She shares that there was a lot of risk involved, especially at the beginning, since they had to build a dedicated facility, but that the women in the prison took it on and made it their own. One aspect that helped them get this project off the ground, is that the Oregon Zoo was able to help guide the rearing details.Mary shares how collaborating with SPP has impacted her. She says it's the ultimate feel good, where you can heal the environment and society at the same time.Rearing Taylor's Checkerspot Butterflies in a Prison SettingNext we talk with Liz Louie about her experience as a butterfly technician. She shares more about how she got started with the program, including going through a traditional interview process, which is not typical for positions in prison. She talks about how she had some skills that were helpful for working with the butterflies, like experience working with data. Liz says that she was fearful at first, because the butterflies are such sensitive little animals! She also shares how it was great to be able to participate through four rearing seasons and that they were able to surpass the prior year's survival rates.We ask Liz about the benefits of working in a program like this. She says that every year the technicians had the option to apply for credit from Evergreen. She talks about how impactful it was for those individuals that had never been to college before or had that kind of an experience and that it pushed participants to pursue further education and gave them confidence to apply for other programs.Liz also explains what butterfly rearing looks like in the prison environment. She talks about the various life cycle stages. She says that the butterfly phase was her favorite part, because you get to handle them a little more and you have to feed them. She also talks about how they have various families or lines and they have to keep track of them so they are breeding different families together. According to the Oregon Zoo website, this is what their recovery project looks like (they provided guidance to the SPP project):“Spring: Adult females and eggs are collected in the wild at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Olympia, Wash., and sent to the zoo for hatching and rearing. The hatched caterpillars are fed leaves grown on grounds at the zoo.Summer: The caterpillars continue to eat and grow until June when they go into a mostly inactive phase called "diapause." The caterpillars are then placed in earthenware pots in a sheltered outside area and periodically inspected.Winter: In February the larvae are brought back into the lab where they begin to eat again.Spring: In March most of the caterpillars are released at sites with suitable habitat to continue growing until they pupate and eclose (or emerge) as butterflies.”You can learn more about the specifics of rearing in the Oregon Zoo's Taylor's Checkerspot Captive Rearing Overview document.Then we chat about how they make the babies…spoiler alert, she says they did try things like playing some Marvin Gay to see if that helped get them in the mood! Typically they take a single female and place 7-8 males from a different lineage into the same tent. They have run various experiments, such as changing the temperature, or the light, trying to get the conditions prime for baby-time! After a male has, you know, joined…the female is placed in her own tent where she lays the eggs and then she is retired into a mix cage to be released.The rearing facility is a greenhouse located just outside of the Mission Creek Correctional Facility (well there are two rearing greenhouses now, but there was one while Liz was there). They raise a bed of plantain, which is a weedy little plant that is the preferred food for the caterpillars. The technicians provide the butterflies with a sponge with sugar water, fresh water and nectar bearing plants, such as cotton candy, which they grow onsite. Both caterpillars and butterflies start to wake up in January, then they are fed at the facility for a couple of weeks before they are released into the field in late February. Liz shares how she thinks prison job programs like this are very important. They provide people with transferable skills that they can use once they are out of prison, but it also provides people with pride and self-confidence to study, learn, and pursue things that they previously thought were not possible. She says that she believes these programs do more good than harm, but she, like others that we have talked with, says that the one thing she wished is that the wages were more representative of the level of work they were completing. For example, she says they only received 35 cents per hour commensurate with other in house jobs (like laundry, kitchen, or custodian), but some of the other physical labor jobs, like for the highway cleanups, incarcerated workers receive a dollar an hour. SPP is working to make it more equitable, but they are working within the legislative confines of current prison wages.In the end Liz says that she is really glad that she found SPP, and that she is excited to hear that they are growing and offering more and more programs, because she believes it is such a good thing for anyone that participates. Most people have a good experience and they learn a lot. Until Next Time…Thank you so much for joining us this episode! We hope you learned more about:Taylor's checkerspot butterfly conservation and restoration efforts and the importance of the South Salish lowland prairies in their recoveryWhat a SPP facilitated conservation program is likeThe impacts of programs like these to species recovery and human enrichment, and how both of these can have a positive impact in our communitiesWe think one of the takeaways from this episode is that rearing and restoring populations of Taylor's Checkerspot Butterflies is difficult, and adding it into a prison setting doesn't make it easier, but the cumulative effort to do so results in benefits to both the butterflies and the humans that participate in the program. This is another major conservation program that is facilitated by SPP, and while we don't expect that all of our listeners (or SPP) have the time and resources to develop big programs, there might be someone out there that has just the perfect program idea to pitch to SPP. Next episode, we will learn more about opportunities to participate with SPP without developing a whole dang program. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts (like Tune In, Castbox Himalaya, iheartradio, etc). Please let us know what you think in the comments below or on our Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest pages. Until next time, Will We Make It Out Alive?

*Trigger Warning= we discuss the gxn violence happening in the past few weeks, mentions of discussing childhood trauma* SOTW: What's Going On by Marvin Gay. HAPPY PRIDE MONTH! We also get into Women's rights, self love, superficial friendships, dating, & elevation. Make sure to check out our new logo too!! Socials: IG-errydayblackgirl, Twitter-@errydayblckgrl, TikTok- errydayblackgirl, Gmail-errydayblckgrl@gmail.com THANK YOU FOR LISTENING, LOVE YOU!

Marvin Gay was one of the biggest singer/songwriters in the world, until a day in 1984 when he was murdered in his bedroom. Music in the episdoe by: Korn Michael D. Keeney Jelly Roll Marvin Gaye Buckcherry

A woman is tricked into believing she was a DEA agent and tricky Japan wants nukes! Get outta town, Japan! Sean Penn sucks, Spencer shared the tales of a Yacht club guy and we cover a beast of a Marvin Gay impersonator. Can you believe it? SUBSCRIBE As always! Make sure you rate, review, and on iTunes! Steal your friend's and family's phones while you're at it, to do so on as many devices as possible. Follow all ya boys on Instagram  @mitchellfillup @robotspencer @beamjeremy  @hogopod @rootsoflaughter Hit up any of us on Instagram or email therootsoflaughter@gmail.com with suggestions, corrections, comments, updates, or good old-fashioned hate mail! Remember to also go check out and share hatsoffglovesoff.com I love you

Today we talk about Marvin Gaye's dad, Marvin Gay Sr who killed his son. We bring it up though with our Trophy Dad this week who was a civil rights powerhouse.

Bible verse for today's show:And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.Read the poem Silver Sapphire or Gold on my blog shirahchante.comBuy my book of poetry Jaundiced View which features the poem Silver, Sapphire, or Gold.Love healing hearts,Shirah ChantePS + Al Green sings "He's Coming Back"  not Marvin Gay

Who's watching the FX series Impeachment - American Crime Story?  Adult Only website OnlyFans to ban sexually explicit photos and videos.  NC State Legislature pass Critical Race Theory bill (House bill 324), what does it say.  Jane Fonda says she regrets not sleeping with Marvin Gay when she had the chance...Song of the week: Never Would Have Made It - Marvin SappJoin us for these topics and more.

Watch Jeff and Emily recording (and jamming) in the studio! Listen to the Summer Fun Power 35 Spotify PlaylistListen to all of Jeff's original, face-melting tunes! See the signed Weezer Ticket that Emily waited in line for CLICK HEREListen to all of Jeff's Tunes on SOUNDCLOUDSubscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNEL! Have Questions? Send yours to askjeff@comeonover.com!  

I just have one question... 

Vocalist Lezlie Harrison's debut album "Soul Book Vol. 1" brings new life to favorites from the 70s. Lezlie says though she loves the Great American Songbook, that wasn't the music of her childhood. She grew up on music from Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire, Marvin Gay and the Delfonics. Lezlie's fresh takes on songs like Bill Wither's "Ain't No Sunshine" and Steve Wonder's "Lately" groove with Saul Rubin on guitar, Ben Paterson on organ, and Russell Carter on the drums. Lezlie's also had quite the career. Fresh out of college, she started working for WBGO, the #1 jazz radio station, then explored France as a model and singer, then came back to New York to pursue a singing career and wound up back at WBGO where you can hear her now. Hear more from Lezlie about her adventures and music, just hit play! To learn more about Lezlie Harrison and her music, head to her website, lezlieharrison.net, and you can find the full album anywhere you stream music.

More traffic issues for Kimmer, Cop lifts a car to save a life, Old TV shows, More 1/06 insurrection talk, Biden trashed the Coast Guard, Joe Scarborough off his meds, BBC responsible for Prince Diana’s death, Meghan Markle disgrace to the royal family,  Odd family video shoot - first viral video, Marvin Gay and Football, Flounder gets his brother bitch slapped, Jon Daily physique, PGA talk,  Kimmer and Mr. T, Biden is a Russian agent, Van Gough exhibit, Kimmer Sword video and other entertaining stuff on today’s Kimmer-castSupport the show (http://Patreon.com/KimmerShow)

L'Invité Gospel est le précurseur, l'initiateur de la Soul française, Stefan FILEY, auteur, compositeur, coach vocal et grand fan de Marvin GAY

Nugget, Episode 1.270, 18.04.2021: Andreas Renner schaut im #musikradio360 zum zweiten Mal in Detroit vorbei. Und bringt diesmal Songs von Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Four Tops und Smokey Robinson & The Miracles mit.

Ep #81 / Apr 1st / April Fools / Marvin Gay KilledShow Summary: ·       Recent Event ·       April Fools - 1700·       Marvin Gay Killed - 1984·       Interesting FactSchedule:·       Monday – Friday Social Media Links:·       Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ourdailyhistorypodcast·       Buzzsprout: https://ourdailyhistory.buzzsprout.com/Resources: ·       Music by JuliusH from Pixabay +·       https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/april-fools-tradition-popularized·       https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marvin-gaye-is-shot-and-killed-by-his-own-father  Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ourdailyhistory)

Wake up is what Marvin Gay said. What is going on? We all need to understand that we all must participate in the oversight and public services engagement! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/darlene-anderson/message

Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/ForwardsJanuary 25 – March 4, 2021Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryLight Work will exhibit more than 20 works by Arkansas–based photographer Aaron Turner in its first main gallery show of 2021. Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/Forwards will be on view in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery. In the solitude of the studio, the artist is never alone. Quite the contrary for Aaron Turner. Sidney Poitier, Martin Luther King, Marvin Gay, Frederick Douglas and others all move up and through the layers of cut paper and projections. The artist handles, arranges, touches both objects and beloved figures, seeking, listening, directing, and responding. Some of these juxtapositions seem random, fluid, almost falling through space, but this is precisely the process Turner invites us to witness.Aaron Turner’s Arkansas delta community and family taught him to know and understand African American history, honor its heroes, and respect his elders. The simple and profound gift of this upbringing has allowed him to pursue the role of Black artist and activist in our culture with unapologetic, single-minded intensity. Turner is in many ways acknowledging, standing on, and building from this foundation in his work. With deep affinity for the formal qualities of black-and-white photography, Aaron Turner uses his large format camera and the alchemical darkroom process to move back and forth between abstraction, still life, collage, and appropriated archival images to literally take apart and then reconstruct his photographic images. The color black itself has a presence in this work—infinite, elegant, unknowable. Turner is also a painter; his use of large swaths of black is both a metaphor for race and related to abstraction and its emphasis on process, materials, and color itself as subject.—Besides his studio practice, Aaron Turner is a teacher, curator, writer, founder of the Center for Photographers of Color (CPoC) at the University of Arkansas, and host of the CPoC podcast. Active in the photo and contemporary art community, he often uses these platforms to discuss his primary muses: other Black artists and activists. Bring a pen and notebook, because Turner is a name dropper in the best sense and you will want to look up these painters, sculptors, photographers, athletes, and activists whom he reveres, some hallowed and some obscure (for now). His generosity reminds us of artists like Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, and Zanele Muholi, who all—understanding art and power—have made it their business to bring a community of artists along with them through the doorway and into the spotlight. He too arrives en masse: perhaps his greatest tribute to his elders in the Arkansas delta.aaronturner.studio—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In, On, and To Are Prepositions That Guide My LifePlease check out the three prepositions that guide my life. I am moving to Wednesday evenings because of work commitments. My friend Adrian from Clubhouse inspired me to make this episode. He thinks I have an interesting relationship with the English language. 0:00 Good evening and welcome to my humble podcast abode. I am Cocoa Griot, just a 50 something sharing ideas about life, and a host of other topics. I am so glad you took the time to join me this evening. For a few moments, let's hang out and talk about my life guiding prepositions. I'm going to start with in. It is incredibly important to live in the moment, in the present. When I am most overwhelmed in life, it's usually due to the fact I'm moving away from in, and my thoughts have taken up residence beyond today. To be clear, in is not easy. The first time crisis comes to visit.,there's an innate response to view it beyond its current state. Projecting how bad it will get robs me of the ability to cope with the current situation. Forcing myself to focus on what the problem is right now for this day is critical. When I am in the moment and just experiencing now, I am happiest The cares of yesterday, or the worries of tomorrow do not concern me. In is such a magnificent and grounding preposition. It took me several years to realize the significance of in. Now that I know its power, I am determined to stay on the right path. What a segue for my next preposition ON. Let's talk about the preposition ON. 1:40 I think of it in the sense of being on top of things that matter in life. I need to be on my game as a mom on task and focused, where my work is concerned. Also, I need to be on a journey, that leads me to the happiest and most fulfilling life. I need to press on when I feel down. I need to move on when something is not beneficial for me spiritually, emotionally, physically and financially. On is important for a myriad of reasons. Just think about it in slang terms. When someone asks us how something is, and the reply is its on, that carries a deep message that is a spectacular thing. I remember we used to say something was on and poppin, you automatically knew you wanted to be a part of something like that. Spot on indicates an action or response is correct. When I want information about events. I asked the famous Marvin Gay question, what's going on? It is hard to go through a day without the preposition ON showing up a significant number of times. Which brings me to my third and final preposition to. 3:03 PLEASE FAST FORWARD. To is the pillar of describing my strength and tenacity. I have the ability to keep going. I have the strength to endure pain. I have connections to family and friends. I have a mind to accomplish my goals. I run to the activities that lift my spirits. I am in to very healthy practices, such as Reiki for meditation. I'm inclined to be kind to others. I am destined to broaden my understanding of God's word by attending church. I budget to make sure my family can live in a safe place. To bridges so many aspects of things in my life. But I know this is not an exhaustive list of prepositions. I do think about to how I changed jobs in order to be more fulfilled. I deleted some people from my life to get rid of negativity. 4:48 I'm going to ask you to allow me to share something I wrote recently, since I am no longer publishing on Medium. I just need an audience to share this with. It is a poem I wrote, because I really did encounter a case of mistaken identity. When I was focused, and in the moment, I realized I needed to move on from someone that turned out to not be who I thought they were. See what I did there? My in, on, and to showed up again. So this poem is called Mistaken Identity. Your voice, sent vibrations that soothed my soul. This half that I hoped you would make whole. No longer and pieces, I hoped you'd heal my heart. Love was seeking to know you each and every part....

After playing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, David moved to the Detroit Symphony where he was principal horn. During his time in Detroit, he was a founding member of the rock group, “Symphonic Metamorphosis”, had an interesting recording experience with Marvin Gay, and continued his interesting relationship with Arthur Fielder. He then won his dream job with the San Fransisco Symphony and worked with music directors Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Hitch-Hike" by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown's defining artists. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Any Other Way" by Jackie Shane. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye's later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things.   Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye's music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" to the very last recordings of his life.   Transcript A brief note -- this week's episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don't think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you're unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we're going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We're going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We're going to look at "Hitch-Hike", and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] One thing we've not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn't fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn't stay long in the Air Force either -- he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he'd faked, with his honourable discharge stating "Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority". Back in Washington DC, where he'd grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees -- in later years, Gaye would state that he'd come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn't heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead -- Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley's work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley's band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, "Wyatt Earp", be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley's band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We've encountered Stewart briefly before -- his first single, "Billy's Blues", was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for "Love is Strange", and he played piano in Diddley's band. With Diddley's band and the Marquees he recorded "Billy's Heartache": [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, "Billy's Heartache"] However, the Marquees' first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group's members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley's driver, and that was to lead to the group's second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like "Diddley Daddy": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] Harvey Fuqua, the group's leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group's tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called "blow harmony", getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, "whoo" sounds rather than the harder-edged "doo" sounds that most doo-wop groups used -- Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them "gang groups". He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well -- David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua.  The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, "Almost Grown" and "Back in the USA": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Back in the USA"] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note -- being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well -- like that he really didn't enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn't want to be on the stage at all -- he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, "Mama Loochie", had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loochie"] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was "Twelve Months of the Year", an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows' "Ten Commandments of Love". On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Twelve Months of the Year"] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career -- and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey -- and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] Marvin had come with Harvey -- he'd signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey's label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn't sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing "Mr. Sandman" at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent -- he saw Fuqua as a father figure -- but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy's sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn't see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss' sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family -- and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin's career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat "King" Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como -- he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that "I always felt like my personality and Perry's had a lot in common". They eventually compromised -- Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide", had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide"] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn't doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected.  The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an "e" to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word "gay" was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin's sexuality which he didn't want to encourage. He did like to wear women's clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn't entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn't want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women's clothing, and tied in with Marvin's wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the "e", as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin's first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio -- he played on a record we've already looked at, "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues" by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues"] And on "That's What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, "That's What Girls are Made For"] And he both co-wrote and played drums on "Beechwood 4-5789" by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty:  [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 4-5789"] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson -- everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin's own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy's encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all  -- if he hadn't given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin's attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school -- a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it.  Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a "basic jazz feeling", and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was "Stubborn Kind of Fellow": [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles' flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record -- Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn't cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing "What Kind of Fool Am I?", the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "What Kind of Fool Am I?"] This was a real concern for him. He would later say "Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give 'em the funk they wanted. It wasn't my first choice, but there's integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter." He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star -- specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder's performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he'd get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] "Hitch-Hike" became Gaye's first real crossover hit -- it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he'd made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand's audiences -- we're still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin's version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording -- this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you'll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Hitch-Hike"] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover "Hitch-Hike", they were far from the only ones -- it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems -- at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he'd bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been.  But for the moment, those things didn't matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter -- and the next time we look at him, it'll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hitch-Hike” by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown’s defining artists. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Any Other Way” by Jackie Shane. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye’s later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things.   Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye’s music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” to the very last recordings of his life.   Transcript A brief note — this week’s episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don’t think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you’re unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we’re going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We’re going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We’re going to look at “Hitch-Hike”, and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] One thing we’ve not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn’t fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn’t stay long in the Air Force either — he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he’d faked, with his honourable discharge stating “Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority”. Back in Washington DC, where he’d grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees — in later years, Gaye would state that he’d come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn’t heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead — Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley’s work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley’s band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, “Wyatt Earp”, be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley’s band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We’ve encountered Stewart briefly before — his first single, “Billy’s Blues”, was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for “Love is Strange”, and he played piano in Diddley’s band. With Diddley’s band and the Marquees he recorded “Billy’s Heartache”: [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Heartache”] However, the Marquees’ first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group’s members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley’s driver, and that was to lead to the group’s second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like “Diddley Daddy”: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] Harvey Fuqua, the group’s leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group’s tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called “blow harmony”, getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, “whoo” sounds rather than the harder-edged “doo” sounds that most doo-wop groups used — Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them “gang groups”. He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well — David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua.  The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, “Almost Grown” and “Back in the USA”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Back in the USA”] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note — being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well — like that he really didn’t enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn’t want to be on the stage at all — he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, “Mama Loochie”, had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loochie”] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was “Twelve Months of the Year”, an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows’ “Ten Commandments of Love”. On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Twelve Months of the Year”] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career — and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey — and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] Marvin had come with Harvey — he’d signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey’s label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn’t sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing “Mr. Sandman” at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent — he saw Fuqua as a father figure — but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy’s sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn’t see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss’ sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family — and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin’s career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat “King” Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como — he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that “I always felt like my personality and Perry’s had a lot in common”. They eventually compromised — Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”, had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn’t doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected.  The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an “e” to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word “gay” was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin’s sexuality which he didn’t want to encourage. He did like to wear women’s clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn’t entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn’t want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women’s clothing, and tied in with Marvin’s wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the “e”, as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin’s first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio — he played on a record we’ve already looked at, “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues” by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues”] And on “That’s What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, “That’s What Girls are Made For”] And he both co-wrote and played drums on “Beechwood 4-5789” by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty:  [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Beechwood 4-5789”] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson — everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin’s own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy’s encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all  — if he hadn’t given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin’s attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school — a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it.  Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a “basic jazz feeling”, and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles’ flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record — Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn’t cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”, the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”] This was a real concern for him. He would later say “Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give ’em the funk they wanted. It wasn’t my first choice, but there’s integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter.” He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star — specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder’s performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he’d get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] “Hitch-Hike” became Gaye’s first real crossover hit — it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he’d made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand’s audiences — we’re still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin’s version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording — this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you’ll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Hitch-Hike”] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover “Hitch-Hike”, they were far from the only ones — it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems — at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he’d bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been.  But for the moment, those things didn’t matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter — and the next time we look at him, it’ll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

Belgické přímořské město Ostende není jen příhodným letoviskem, ve kterém se na pláži nostalgicky posadíte do klasických dřevěných kabinek anebo zavzpomínáte na časy, kdy tu trávil čas slavný americký zpěvák Marvin Gay. Bohaté architektonické dědictví města charakterizuje jeden z nejpůsobivějších příkladů belgické moderny: Vila De Ooievaar.

After Marvin Gaye was murdered by his father in 1984, his family was torn apart. As Marvin Sr. found himself embroiled in a high-profile legal battle, the rest of the family struggled to grieve and untangle the singer’s complicated legacy.

Marvin Gaye was one of the most famous singers in American history, but not everyone was enamored with him—specifically his father, Marvin Gay Sr. Eventually, their contentious relationship hit a boiling point... and in 1984, Marvin Junior paid for it with his life.

This week on the Scratch a Track podcast we will be scratching Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On. In each episode we will be discussing the history of the album, each track, and ultimately which track on the album we would scratch off.For more information please follow us on twitter as well as our YouTube Channel. There you will be able to take part in polls, suggest albums, and let us know what track you would scratch.Happy Scratching!!Links:https://twitter.com/scratchatrackhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1y5SBLxt4V187J6CKGswgA/https://www.facebook.com/Scratch-A-Track-100105891679603/https://www.instagram.com/scratchatrack/Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scratch-a-track-presented-by-the-dude-and-grimm-show/id1507247887Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0qBOg1wkxPu5EY0FQQaMgOGoogle Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS85ODIyMDQucnNzAll music on this podcast has been provided and used with permission by:...more https://soundcloud.com/user-122188109The Timnz https://soundcloud.com/the-timnz

The guys argue over Indiana Jones and Mel Brooks movies.  WARNING!: Wayne shares his experience with some disgusting videos from the internet so if you are squimish, you might want to skip 28:00-41:00.  This episode's MasterPOS is Marvin Gay Sr.  (No, it's spelled right)  Enjoy!

This week on Bombshell Radio we Time Warp into 1968. Two hours of selected tracks, and a few Time Warp requests.There were a few songs I omitted for time and feel. This is Addictions and Other Vices 290- Time Warp 1968 I hope you enjoy!Mary Hopkins - Those Were the DaysBee Gees- WordsMama Cass- Dream a Little Dream of meThink-Aretha FranklinLove Child-Diana Ross and the SupremesGreen Tambourine-The Lemon PipersThe Unicorn Song-The Irish rovers123 Red Light-1910 Fruit Gum CompanyDo you know the Way to San Jose?-Dion WarwickThe Mod Squad-OSTMrs. Robinson-Simon and GarfunkelSpooky-the Classics lVThis old Heart of Mine-The Isley BrothersYummy Yummy Yummy-1010 Fruit Gum CompanyHello Goodbye-the BeatlesBuild me up Buttercup-the FoundationsEleanore-The TurtlesYoung Girl-Gary Puckett and the Union GapHarper Valley PTA-Jeannie C ReillyHoney-Bobby GoldsboroScarborough fair/Canticle-Simon and GarfunkelJumping Jack flash-the Rolling StonesDance to the Music-Sly and the Family StoneI'm a Girl Watcher-The O'KaysionsHello I Love you-The DoorsA Beautiful Morning-The RascalsSittin' on the Dock of the Bay-Otis ReddingMacArthur Park-Richard HarrisI got to get a message to you-The Bee GeesHey Jude- The BeatlesCrimson and Clover-Tommy James and the ShondellsNothing like the real thing-Marvin Gay and Tami TyrellI Say a Little prayer-Aretha FranklinShoo Be Doo Be Doo Da Day - Stevie WonderSimple Simon Says - 1910 Fruitgum Company

Brian G. Gilmore was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters, a 2014 NAACP Image Award Nominee. He is both a Cave Canem Fellow and a Kimbilio Fellow, and he currently teaches social justice law at Michigan State University.Brian joins us today to talk about his Michigan Notable Book of poetry, Come See About Me, Marvin from Wayne State University Press. In this latest collection, Brian imagines a dialogue between himself and Marvin Gaye, another black man from Washington D.C. who moved here to follow his career. The poems were written, in part, as a way of coping in a strange new land. Check out the book here: https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/come-see-about-me-marvin

No RUÍDOS de hoje, Flávio e Tody relembram a adolescência com muitos fios de cabelo a mais e um guarda-roupa todo preto para dissecar a música “2 minutes to midnight” do Iron Maiden, contando um pouco do contexto histórico em que a música foi escrita e discutindo as analogias da letra, tudo isso regado a algumas pitadas de nostalgia. E-MAIL: ruidospodcast@gmail.com FACEBOOK: /ruidospodcast TWITTER: @ruidospodcast SE INSCREVA NO NOSSO CANAL NO YOUTUBE! Recomendações Tody: Luigi Nono, A Floresta é Jovem e Cheja de Vida (1966) https://youtu.be/2U8Mb5wN12g Flávio: Marvin Gay, What's Going On? https://youtu.be/H-kA3UtBj4M Links Guerra Fria: https://tinyurl.com/vouyr49 Perestroika e Glasnost na URSS: https://tinyurl.com/y7xo3dvz Relógio do Juízo Final marca 100 segundos para a meia-noite, e isso não é nada bom: https://tinyurl.com/r9ea8uc Doomsday Clock: https://tinyurl.com/y2vywupx Dez Hinos Contra a Guerra do Vietnã: https://tinyurl.com/y96kyh47

Follow the instagram for updates/news/vinyl and general music chat - www.instagram.com/bsidepodcasts/ Follow the facebook here - www.facebook.com/BsidePodcasts/ Bside Incoming: Blo Half French, half Spanish, based in Brussels, Blo is an up and coming producer with releases on Piff records, Charmin Records, Strictly Flava, and apparently much much more in the pipeline. He appeared in the Bside radar with a wonderful edit of Marvin Gay called ‘Gay for Marvin': www.youtube.com/watch?v=qie8Yu-np9U&t=108s This episode has two distinct moods, beginning with some soothing jazz classics from the likes of Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti and a lovely rare Nigerian track. Next, we float on through to the kind of deep house grooves which have obviously influenced many of Blo's own amazing productions, includes a jazzy cut from Nick Holder, many personal treasures which would have cost a pretty penny, as well as some long awaited re-presses from Da Houze Maroon and Suzukiski. Check out his soundcloud here - https://soundcloud.com/blobloblo Check his Blue EP release on Bandcamp - https://piff-records.bandcamp.com/album/blue-ep Thanks to Molly Hickey for the beautiful artwork as always. www.instagram.com/mollyth.art/

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Money" by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----Erratum I say “His name didn't appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong's name didn't appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer.   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy's career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes.  Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we're going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we'll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we're going to look at "Money" by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money"] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson -- while the songs he'd co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson's manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson's records were selling solely because of Wilson's performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family's record labels, but he wasn't going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he'd got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he'd seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He'd worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she'd turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting -- Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson's attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song -- Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called "Get a Job": [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, "Get a Job"] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called "Got a Job". Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording -- he'd recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner's label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn't happy with the group's name -- The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was "the Miracles"; and so "Got a Job" by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson's eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Got a Job"] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He'd decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release -- he'd lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister's label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way -- they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone -- you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in "I Can't Concentrate" by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: "I Can't Concentrate", Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn't making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average -- and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing "Lonely Teardrops" for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn't add much to that -- when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for "Got a Job", he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you'll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit's black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they'd stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion -- one he didn't come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan -- and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was "Tammy", after Debbie Reynolds' hit, to show that they weren't just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, "Tammy"] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla's first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There's an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men -- "The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they'd be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did." One can argue about whether it's colder to cynically manipulate people's feelings or to show contempt for them, but it's definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, "My Baby-O", on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "My Baby-O"] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track -- others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy's involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, "Come to Me", was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers -- James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "Come to Me"] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry's apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "The Joke (Is Not On Me)"] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry's demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, "Merry Go Round"] Marv Johnson's record, "Come to Me", became a local hit, but as we've talked about before, when you're running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit -- you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for "Come to Me", and to buy both Johnson and Holland's contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star -- "Come to Me" ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn't do so well on United Artists -- he wasn't ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy's operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It's been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy's mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson's favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic "The Wind": [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, "The Wind"] Nolan Strong's cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he'd collaborated on Jackie Wilson's hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Let's Rock"] Unfortunately, "Let's Rock" wasn't a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was "Snake Walk", a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, "Snake Walk (part 1)"] There was "It", a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name "Ron & Bill": [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, "It"] And a few more. But it wasn't until Barett Strong's second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how "Money" was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn't think she'd contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn't contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, "I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants," and she replied "Money, that's what I want!" and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* -- who played the piano on the session as well as singing -- was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles' "What'd I Say". Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song's copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that's because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn't understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong's name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn't informed of the change. His name didn't appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn't sound that much like Gordy's other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn't tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money"] The B-side isn't quite as good, but it's still a strong ballad, and if you're a fan of John Lennon's solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Oh I Apologize"] "Money" came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn't have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn't the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, "Spoonful"] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis -- and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that "Money" finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn't have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters' label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money"] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong's only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to "Money", titled "Money and Me", with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman -- a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money and Me"] That didn't work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won't be the last we'll see of him -- he'll be back with a new job in a few years' time. But in late 1959, they didn't know yet that "Money" would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy's home -- he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry's sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business -- liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry's first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first -- the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session -- but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like "You Got What It Takes": [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "You Got What It Takes"] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, "I Love The Way You Love": [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "I Love the Way You Love"] But those hits were on someone else's label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, "Bad Girl": [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Bad Girl"] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and "Bad Girl" was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn't have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. "Bad Girl" went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn't pay Gordy's company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn't going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Money” by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-Erratum I say “His name didn’t appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong’s name didn’t appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy’s career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes.  Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we’re going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we’ll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we’re going to look at “Money” by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson — while the songs he’d co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson’s manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson’s records were selling solely because of Wilson’s performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family’s record labels, but he wasn’t going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he’d got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he’d seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He’d worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she’d turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting — Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson’s attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song — Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called “Get a Job”: [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, “Get a Job”] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called “Got a Job”. Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording — he’d recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner’s label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn’t happy with the group’s name — The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was “the Miracles”; and so “Got a Job” by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson’s eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Got a Job”] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He’d decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release — he’d lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister’s label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way — they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone — you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in “I Can’t Concentrate” by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: “I Can’t Concentrate”, Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn’t making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average — and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing “Lonely Teardrops” for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn’t add much to that — when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for “Got a Job”, he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you’ll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit’s black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they’d stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion — one he didn’t come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan — and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was “Tammy”, after Debbie Reynolds’ hit, to show that they weren’t just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, “Tammy”] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla’s first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There’s an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men — “The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they’d be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did.” One can argue about whether it’s colder to cynically manipulate people’s feelings or to show contempt for them, but it’s definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, “My Baby-O”, on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “My Baby-O”] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track — others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy’s involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, “Come to Me”, was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers — James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “Come to Me”] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry’s apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “The Joke (Is Not On Me)”] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry’s demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Merry Go Round”] Marv Johnson’s record, “Come to Me”, became a local hit, but as we’ve talked about before, when you’re running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit — you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for “Come to Me”, and to buy both Johnson and Holland’s contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star — “Come to Me” ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn’t do so well on United Artists — he wasn’t ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy’s operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It’s been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy’s mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson’s favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic “The Wind”: [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, “The Wind”] Nolan Strong’s cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he’d collaborated on Jackie Wilson’s hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Let’s Rock”] Unfortunately, “Let’s Rock” wasn’t a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was “Snake Walk”, a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, “Snake Walk (part 1)”] There was “It”, a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name “Ron & Bill”: [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, “It”] And a few more. But it wasn’t until Barett Strong’s second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how “Money” was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn’t think she’d contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn’t contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, “I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants,” and she replied “Money, that’s what I want!” and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* — who played the piano on the session as well as singing — was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”. Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song’s copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that’s because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn’t understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong’s name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn’t informed of the change. His name didn’t appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn’t sound that much like Gordy’s other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn’t tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] The B-side isn’t quite as good, but it’s still a strong ballad, and if you’re a fan of John Lennon’s solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Oh I Apologize”] “Money” came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn’t have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn’t the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis — and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that “Money” finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn’t have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters’ label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong’s only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to “Money”, titled “Money and Me”, with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman — a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money and Me”] That didn’t work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won’t be the last we’ll see of him — he’ll be back with a new job in a few years’ time. But in late 1959, they didn’t know yet that “Money” would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy’s home — he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry’s sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business — liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry’s first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first — the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session — but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like “You Got What It Takes”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “You Got What It Takes”] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, “I Love The Way You Love”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “I Love the Way You Love”] But those hits were on someone else’s label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, “Bad Girl”: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Bad Girl”] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and “Bad Girl” was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn’t have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. “Bad Girl” went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn’t pay Gordy’s company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn’t going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Money” by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-Erratum I say “His name didn’t appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong’s name didn’t appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy’s career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes.  Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we’re going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we’ll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we’re going to look at “Money” by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson — while the songs he’d co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson’s manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson’s records were selling solely because of Wilson’s performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family’s record labels, but he wasn’t going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he’d got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he’d seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He’d worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she’d turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting — Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson’s attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song — Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called “Get a Job”: [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, “Get a Job”] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called “Got a Job”. Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording — he’d recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner’s label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn’t happy with the group’s name — The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was “the Miracles”; and so “Got a Job” by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson’s eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Got a Job”] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He’d decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release — he’d lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister’s label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way — they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone — you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in “I Can’t Concentrate” by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: “I Can’t Concentrate”, Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn’t making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average — and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing “Lonely Teardrops” for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn’t add much to that — when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for “Got a Job”, he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you’ll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit’s black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they’d stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion — one he didn’t come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan — and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was “Tammy”, after Debbie Reynolds’ hit, to show that they weren’t just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, “Tammy”] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla’s first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There’s an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men — “The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they’d be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did.” One can argue about whether it’s colder to cynically manipulate people’s feelings or to show contempt for them, but it’s definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, “My Baby-O”, on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “My Baby-O”] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track — others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy’s involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, “Come to Me”, was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers — James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “Come to Me”] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry’s apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “The Joke (Is Not On Me)”] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry’s demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Merry Go Round”] Marv Johnson’s record, “Come to Me”, became a local hit, but as we’ve talked about before, when you’re running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit — you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for “Come to Me”, and to buy both Johnson and Holland’s contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star — “Come to Me” ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn’t do so well on United Artists — he wasn’t ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy’s operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It’s been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy’s mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson’s favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic “The Wind”: [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, “The Wind”] Nolan Strong’s cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he’d collaborated on Jackie Wilson’s hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Let’s Rock”] Unfortunately, “Let’s Rock” wasn’t a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was “Snake Walk”, a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, “Snake Walk (part 1)”] There was “It”, a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name “Ron & Bill”: [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, “It”] And a few more. But it wasn’t until Barett Strong’s second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how “Money” was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn’t think she’d contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn’t contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, “I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants,” and she replied “Money, that’s what I want!” and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* — who played the piano on the session as well as singing — was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”. Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song’s copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that’s because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn’t understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong’s name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn’t informed of the change. His name didn’t appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn’t sound that much like Gordy’s other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn’t tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] The B-side isn’t quite as good, but it’s still a strong ballad, and if you’re a fan of John Lennon’s solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Oh I Apologize”] “Money” came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn’t have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn’t the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis — and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that “Money” finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn’t have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters’ label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong’s only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to “Money”, titled “Money and Me”, with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman — a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money and Me”] That didn’t work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won’t be the last we’ll see of him — he’ll be back with a new job in a few years’ time. But in late 1959, they didn’t know yet that “Money” would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy’s home — he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry’s sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business — liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry’s first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first — the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session — but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like “You Got What It Takes”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “You Got What It Takes”] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, “I Love The Way You Love”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “I Love the Way You Love”] But those hits were on someone else’s label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, “Bad Girl”: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Bad Girl”] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and “Bad Girl” was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn’t have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. “Bad Girl” went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn’t pay Gordy’s company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn’t going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

En los episodios de esta semana traemos cuatro discos de 2019 que nos han gustado especialmente y a los que teníamos un espacio reservado. Empezamos el martes con dos trabajos en clave soul que nos parece que destacan especialmente por encima del resto; "Jaime" de Brittany Howard y "Kiwanuka" de Michael Kiwanuka. Soul, rock, góspel y buen gusto son los ingredientes de hoy en los que se mezclan rastros de Prince y Pink Floyd, Marvin Gay y Frank Ocean, entre otros.

Coronavirus and the quarantine playlist The guys share some favorites to listen to while we all self-quarantine during the Coronavirus outbreak and talk about it's effects on the music business. We hope you enjoy the list of songs and albums that we are suggesting for your own quarantine benefits. Tracks: Iso Indies - Kids on the Porch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkg8m3VRhIk Sam Hunt - Kinfolks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk7ITw2Bl8s Dakota - La Comuna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhLexuIcBEc Let's get it on by Marvin Gay https://youtu.be/x6QZn9xiuOE Heathens by 21 pilots https://youtu.be/UprcpdwuwCg Mother Stands For Comfort by Kate Bush https://youtu.be/ESRpQurzJsg I fought the law by The Clash https://youtu.be/AL8chWFuM-s Los ejes de mi carreta by Atajualpa Yupanqui https://youtu.be/-UnseDAE_08 Expensive Shit by Fela Kuti https://youtu.be/yUNkimxj0Vo Nuestra juramento by Julio Jaramillo https://youtu.be/pQRRnGYwQ04 Cabin Fever by Marcelo Quinonez https://youtu.be/8t76D8ivGJY Albums/Soundtracks: 8 mile Rush Hour Interstellar --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/themoodismusic/support

Judith Finell, Musicologist, president of Judith Finell Music Services Season 2, Episode 6 Ever started explaining something to a friend, and you can tell, usually, immediately, this person has no idea what you're talking about (you can see it in the eyes). When that happens, I always make up a little story... “It’s like trying to describe the idea of fusion to a clueless platypus.” Or... “It’s like explaining the theory of general relativity to a stupid rabbit.” Or... “It’s like discussing the concepts of thermodynamics with a slow turtle. ” With that in mind, the best way to describe this podcast would be,  "Trying to describe Music Theory to a Dimwitted Penguin." And, in this case, the "Dimwitted Penguin" happens to be me. That's mainly because this episode covers the ideas of plagiarism, music, copyright, and the law. Three things I can't always wrap my brain around. The background for this episode revolves around the "Blurred Lines" court case from a few years back. It started back in 2013 when the Marvin Gaye Estate sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over their single, "Blurred Lines".  The Gaye Family claimed that Thick and Williams didn't so much write a song as they just stole the music from Marvin Gay's 1977 song, "Give it up." To me, it seemed like a pretty straightforward case - they did steal it, or they didn't?  But nothing is ever easy. How do you prove, prove to a jury that something is a copy? Two songs may sound the same - but are they the same? How can you prove plagiarism and how can you prove it in a court of law. Can you even copyright a sound? So, in the case of, "Blurred Lines," the Marvin Gaye Estate turned to Judith Finell. Judith is a musicologist, and she happens to understand music, the law, plagiarism and copyright better than anyone... From her website... She has testified in disputes for Michael Jackson, Sony/CBS, Warner-Chappell, the estates of Igor Stravinsky and Bob Marley and before the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington on behalf of the National Music Publishers Assn. in a dispute with the RIAA. Ms. Finell’s firm regularly advises entertainment company clients on licensing and risk avoidance in copyright matters, including HBO, Sony Pictures, Disney, Grey Advertising, Lionsgate, LucasFilms, CBS, and others. It's an insightful conversation. We discuss the definition of, "musicologist," how Judith, "sees" music in her head, How copyright law forced her to play the piano in court, and how she was able to convince a jury that two songs are indeed the same. Plus, Judith tells us what exactly is, "Perfect Pitch."

Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ Don't you care by Alice Clark on Alice Clark (Mainstream records) 0′00″ Don't you care by Alice Clark on Alice Clark (Mainstream records) 3′14″ Use me by Bill Withers on Still Bill (Sony music) 6′40″ I'm so tired by Bobby "Blue" Bland on That's it (MCA) 9′45″ Trying to Live My Life Without You by Otis Clay on Trying To Live My Life Without You (Fat Possum Records) 13′37″ Drowning in the sea of love by Joe Simon on Drowning in the sea of love (Ace records) 16′51″ Aretha, sing one for me by George Jackson on The Blues Sessions (Hi records) 19′45″ Border song (holy moses) by Aretha Franklin on The Very Best of Aretha Franklin (Atlantic) 24′25″ "T" plays it cool by Marvin Gay on Trouble man (Motown) 30′52″ Chrystal illusion by Creations unlimited on Boddie recording company (Numero group) 34′06″ Pride and Vanity by Ohio Players on Pleasure (Westbound records) 39′42″ Do you love my music by Horace Andy on Skylarking (Virgin) 43′32″ We belong together by Phyllis Dillon on Love is all I had (Trojan) 46′22″ Mulatu by Mulatu Astatke on New York - Addis - London (Strut) 52′48″ Call me honey by Arthur Alexander on Rainbow road (Warner) 54′52″ Dancing in the moonlight by King Harvest on Dancing in the moonlight (Darbo Music) 58′06″ Pelle Di Luna by Piero Umiliani on La Ragazza Dalla Pelle Di Luna OST (Right tempo) Check out the full archives on the website.

Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ Don't you care by Alice Clark on Alice Clark (Mainstream records) 0′00″ Don't you care by Alice Clark on Alice Clark (Mainstream records) 3′14″ Use me by Bill Withers on Still Bill (Sony music) 6′40″ I'm so tired by Bobby "Blue" Bland on That's it (MCA) 9′45″ Trying to Live My Life Without You by Otis Clay on Trying To Live My Life Without You (Fat Possum Records) 13′37″ Drowning in the sea of love by Joe Simon on Drowning in the sea of love (Ace records) 16′51″ Aretha, sing one for me by George Jackson on The Blues Sessions (Hi records) 19′45″ Border song (holy moses) by Aretha Franklin on The Very Best of Aretha Franklin (Atlantic) 24′25″ "T" plays it cool by Marvin Gay on Trouble man (Motown) 30′52″ Chrystal illusion by Creations unlimited on Boddie recording company (Numero group) 34′06″ Pride and Vanity by Ohio Players on Pleasure (Westbound records) 39′42″ Do you love my music by Horace Andy on Skylarking (Virgin) 43′32″ We belong together by Phyllis Dillon on Love is all I had (Trojan) 46′22″ Mulatu by Mulatu Astatke on New York - Addis - London (Strut) 52′48″ Call me honey by Arthur Alexander on Rainbow road (Warner) 54′52″ Dancing in the moonlight by King Harvest on Dancing in the moonlight (Darbo Music) 58′06″ Pelle Di Luna by Piero Umiliani on La Ragazza Dalla Pelle Di Luna OST (Right tempo)

August 1963-1973

Marvin Gay sang it..."Sexual Healing". In this moment when there are still unthinkable atrocities affecting children and adults alike...we all have the opportunity to do a little 'sexual healing' which will ultimately result in Honoring, Loving and Respecting 'Self'. Collectively assisting in ending the manipulation of 'Self' and others through the act of sex.Explore and Align with 'Self', How to reconnect to Self?Parables shared...Walk through a guided clearing experience and meditation. This episode will assist you in coming into heal, let go and move forward. Sacral Healing.Please send in your questions to s@suzannetoro.com or call in during the episode.Connect withSuzanne Toro

Marvin Gay sang it..."Sexual Healing". In this moment when there are still unthinkable atrocities affecting children and adults alike...we all have the opportunity to do a little 'sexual healing' which will ultimately result in Honoring, Loving and Respecting 'Self'. Collectively assisting in ending the manipulation of 'Self' and others through the act of sex. Explore and Align with 'Self', How to reconnect to Self? Parables shared...Walk through a guided clearing experience and meditation. This episode will assist you in coming into heal, let go and move forward. Sacral Healing. Please send in your questions to s@suzannetoro.com or call in during the episode. Connect with Suzanne Toro Bare Naked Bliss Meditations-Audio Book BareNakeBliss e-book  

Hey there. Dorktown has returned and we have some questions for you.Seriously, we have questions.Like, "What happens to you when you die?" Woah, that's like, heavy, Doc.Some other things might go-down in this episode. Like Ratt collab-ing with Marvin Gay, classic 80s movies being developed into TV shows, the Han Solo movie, Dorktown declaring it won't be begging for money like some other podcast we know, and much more fun.CLICK TO LISTEN: Dorktown228.mp3 23.3MB | 51:03 | Fowl Language!PODCAST LINKS-You can also find this pod on iTunes and Stitcher. Like our Face and Tweet & Instagram us @dorktown. Follow Mikey @thefresnan.

This week: a lively discussion about the wildest doughnut flavors in the country, as well as our picks for the best cakey, glazed, and jelly-filled doughnuts in Connecticut and New York. We explore the trend of the “new” happy hours—both with and without alcohol—and Carla Bartolucci, the author of the cookbook Einkorn, is our special guest. If you cook for someone with a gluten sensitivity, you won’t want to miss what Carla and her husband are doing with this ancient grain. Plus, we make pizza, quick bread, and more, all with delicious, nutty einkorn. Aired: March 16, 2017 (original air date: February 18, 2016) Photo: doughnut plant by Garrett Ziegler/flickr, creative commons CONTRIBUTORS AND GUESTS:• Chris Prosperi — chef/owner, Métro Bis in Simsbury, Conn.• Anthony DeSerio — cocktail expert• Carla Bartolucci — author of Einkorn, co-founder of Jovial Foods, Inc. MUSIC:• “Got to Give it Up,” Marvin Gay• “Happy (Instrumental)," Pharrell Williams• “Beans and Cornbread,” Louis Jordan and The Tympany Five• “Girl On Fire,” Alicia Keyes• “Good to Be Alive,” Andy Grammer• “Everybody Eats When They Come to My House,” Cab CallowaySupport the show: https://foodschmooze.org/donate/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Discotron -go on dance to it- Darian -upside- Saarid -future lately- Late night tuff guy -do you wanna get down / bad girls- Yolanda B Cool -to be alone- Fabo -can't decide- Loverdose -i remember in the air tonight- Nebraska -khan's bergain- 3th World -now that we found love- dj Fudge -simpatico- Monsieur Zon Zon -sing it back- Gary's Gang -knock me out- Mousse T -fire- Marvin Gay -got to give it up- David Joseph -you can't hide-

E,W & F -i write a song for you- Oletta Adams -get here- The Commodores -sweet love- Erman Erim -hypnagogia- Mary Jane Girls -all night long- Marvin Gay -sexual healing- Donna Summer -love to love you baby- Auratones -cool rules- Maceo Parker -cross the tracks- Cajmere -love is you- Ultra Nate -free- Pagany -another star- Smoove & Turrel -the falling in love- Frank Sinatra -fly me to the moon- Incognito -don't you worry about a thing- Minnie Riperton -lovin'you-

Join 'She' for 54 minutes to work on the Inner Self. During this segment: Marvin Gay sang it..."Sexual Healing". In this moment when there are still unthinkable atrocities affecting children and adults alike...we all have the opportunity to do a little 'sexual healing' which will ultimately result in Honoring, Loving and Respecting 'Self'. Collectively assisting in ending the manipulation of 'Self' and others through the act of sex. Explore and Align with 'Self', How to reconnect to Self? Parables shared...Walk through a guided clearing experience and meditation. This episode will assist you in coming into Balance... Please send in your questions to s@suzannetoro.com or call in during the episode. Music by Marvin Gay and Others... Connect with Suzanne Toro Bare Naked Bliss Meditations-Audio Book BareNakeBliss e-book  

We are back to discuss Friends Season 8, episodes 17 and 18.    Also Shout out to the Quadcast, a new awesome podcasting friend to our show. We talk about them and set up a tease for their show.    In, 'The One With The Teas Leaves', Phoebe reads the teas leaves of the ladies leading to a prediction of their future. Monica is perplexed by Chandler's poor CD managment skills. Ross attmepts to steal his salmon shirt back  from Mona.  In' 'The One With Massapequa', the Gellars celebrate their Wedding Anniversary and everyones coming to the party. Phoebe brings Alec Baldwin-the happiest man in the world. Monica trys to get her parents to cry at her toast. Rachel and Ross have a pretend wedding and get gifts. Supplant from DVD liner notes guy. Sissors and tape are pre-photoshop. Josh does a bad Marvin Gay. Aerosmith>James Taylor. Joshua helps out during the break.    Tweet to @JoshSolbach and @MelissaSolbach Email theonewithpodcast@gmail.com call 316-361-6081 please rate and review the podcast on iTunes. 

The Bo Don't Know Edition. The sad tragedy involving the Kansas City Chiefs organization. MTV comes through with another horrible television show idea. A trip to see Christmas lights and a drunk Santa. Chivalry is dead. Our homeless people are better than your homeless people. Diving head first off of the fiscal cliff. Dr. Dre's making money like it's 1992. Katt Williams goes crazy once again. Plus, Kate Middleton, Marvin Gay, Kirstie's Hollywood Smash, Black People Newz, Un-Fun Facts Trivia, and much more! www.beyondserious.com

Join 'She' for 54 minutes to work on the Inner Self. During this segment: Marvin Gay sang it..."Sexual Healing". In this moment when there are still unthinkable atrocities affecting children and adults alike...we all have the opportunity to do a little 'sexual healing' which will ultimately result in Honoring, Loving and Respecting 'Self'. Collectively assisting in ending the manipulation of 'Self' and others through the act of sex. Explore and Align with 'Self', How to reconnect to Self? Parables shared...Walk through a guided clearing experience and meditation. This episode will assist you in coming into Balance... Please send in your questions to s@suzannetoro.com or call in during the episode. Music by TBD Connect with Suzanne Toro Bare Naked Bliss Meditations-Audio Book BareNakeBliss e-book Facebook    Bare Naked Experience Twitter Etsy

This is Episode 1 of our biweekly podcast from NYC every other Saturday night. In this week's Episode we have a special guest mix from DJ Q. For more information and mixes from DJ Q go to http://djqthis.podomatic.com or http://www.myspace.com/djq365 or on Facebook search Djqthis Davidson. I hope this show, warms your soul! Tracklist: 1.Chas Burns "Drifter" 2. Jamie Myerson, The Listening Project featuring Carol Trip "Rescue Me" (Angels Smooth & Soulful Mix) 3. DJ Adnan "Speaking Myth" (DJ Adnan's Mix 4. Natalie Cole "Livin' 4 Love" (Deep Dub) 5. Roy Davis Jr. "Soldier Listen" 6. Marvin Gay "What's Going On" (1200 Warriors Bootleg Remix) DJ Q in the mix The old School Jam of the week is from the Album All Aboard Da Phunk (1996) MD X Spress "Is It Love"

Xtinguish Records presents ARSIN,who's a Hip Hop artist from the Mantua area of Philadelphia which is also know as “Da Bottom”. Influenced by artists like James Brown, Michael Jackson, Bone Thugs, Nas, 2pac, Eminem, Naughty by Nature, Brand Nubians, Chub Rock and Marvin Gay, ARSIN later decided that music would be the best career path for him. ARSIN had his first encounter with Hip Hop music in 1995 when he found a “Brand Nubians” cassette tape on the ground and popped it in his radio. He went through struggles, which was one of the reasons he identified with the inspirational content in the Hip Hop music he collected. ARSIN realized he could inspire and reach people the same way. He got his name when the crowd began to scream “fire” every time he performed. He looked up different names for Fire and came up with Arson, which was later changed to ARSIN (Our-sin) because his philosophy was that “our – sin”, the idea of right and wrong affects the values of society in terms of classism, racism, political and religious beliefs. He uses his music to reflect his experiences with those issues while creating a versatile sound and performance that is guaranteed to entertain. ARSIN's music started spreading across the underground scene with a commercial sound which later inspired the premiere of his first single REWIND on 100.3 The Beat, a Philadelphia Hip Hop and R&B radio station. After selling mixtapes across the U.S positive feedback begin to increase because of his latest mixtape “Fire Escape pt2”. Which featured the single which became #6 on Dj Touchtones (from100.3 The beat) top ten and ARSIN later went down to #4 on the countdown. This lead to his premiere live interview on mainstream radio n 100.3 The Beat. That buzz caught the attention of other media outlets and ARSIN later did his first radio interview on 105.3 WDAS fm with Patty Jackson. He continued pushing his music and landed his first ringtone deal with Thumbplay Ringtones Inc.He has also been on t