Berry Gordy turned an $800 family loan into Motown
Before he built the most famous Black-owned record company in America, Berry Gordy was a high-school dropout boxer, an Army chaplain's assistant in Korea and the owner of a failed jazz shop. In 1959 he borrowed $800 from relatives to start a label; he eventually sold it for $61 million.
Gordy was born in Detroit on November 28, 1929, the seventh of eight children of parents who had left Georgia in 1922 during the Great Migration. His grandfather was the son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman; through that plantation owner's legitimate line, Gordy's father was a half-uncle of President Jimmy Carter's father. Young Berry cared more about boxing than the family's grocery, plastering and printing businesses, quitting school in eleventh grade to fight professionally. Drafted for the Korean War, he ended up driving a jeep and playing organ at services near the front.
Back in Detroit his record shop, which sold jazz with 3-D glasses, went under, but a nightclub connection introduced him to the singer Jackie Wilson. Wilson recorded Reet Petite, co-written by Gordy and his sister Gwen, in 1957, and later Lonely Teardrops, which reached the top of the R&B chart. Gordy put his songwriting income into production, discovered the Miracles, and on Smokey Robinson's urging borrowed the $800. He wanted to call the label Tammy Records, after a Debbie Reynolds song, but the name was taken, so Tamla opened on January 12, 1959.
Tamla and a sister label, Motown, merged in April 1960. The Miracles' Shop Around became the company's first million-seller, and the Marvelettes' Please Mr. Postman topped both pop and R&B charts in 1961. Gordy went on to sign the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5, and he personally shaped how his artists dressed, moved and spoke so they could reach every audience.
In 1972 he moved to Los Angeles and produced Lady Sings the Blues, pushing a hesitant studio to cast Billy Dee Williams. By the late 1980s Motown's dominance had faded, and in 1988 Gordy sold his stake. A few years later Polygram paid over $330 million for the catalogue, to which he had contributed 240 songs.
Source: Berry Gordy
