A house in Detroit with a sign over the door
MOTOWN started in a small house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, bought by Berry Gordy in 1959 with an $800 loan from his family. He nailed a sign reading Hitsville U.S.A. above the door, turned the garage into a studio and a back room into the control room, and kept the place working almost around the clock.
Gordy had spent time on a car assembly line, and he ran the label a little like one. Every Friday morning the staff met to vote on which records should come out, and songs were dropped if the room wasn't convinced. His test was blunt: if you had your last bit of money, would you buy this record or a sandwich?
Church music with the words changed
Soul came out of GOSPEL. Ray Charles took the shouts, answering phrases and piano of church singing and pointed them at everyday life — his 1954 hit 'I Got a Woman' reworks a gospel song, with 'my Lord' swapped for 'my baby'. Some churchgoers were appalled at hearing sacred music used that way; younger listeners heard something thrilling, and a genre was born.
That is also where the sound of a MOTOWN record comes from: SOULFUL, HEARTFELT VOCALS with a TAMBOURINE cracking on every BACKBEAT. The studio's engineers would use whatever was lying around to sharpen the rhythm, including a set of tyre chains rattled in time.
The band nobody put on the sleeve
The musicians who played on most of those hits were a pool of Detroit session players known as the Funk Brothers, working in a basement studio they called the Snake Pit and rarely credited on the records. A documentary about them claimed they had played on more number ones than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys put together.
Their bass player, James Jamerson, wrote some of the most copied BASSLINE parts in pop, and played almost all of them with a single finger — which other bass players nicknamed the Hook.
Everything lands on the one
Funk grew out of soul in the 1960s, and James Brown moved the emphasis. Instead of leaning on beats two and four — the BACKBEAT most pop is built on — he told his band to hit the first beat of the bar hard and leave gaps everywhere else. Every player got a short, SYNCOPATED pattern: choppy guitar, stabbing HORNS, a bubbling CLAVINET, all interlocking like gears. Musicians call the result the POCKET, and when it is right, nothing sounds crowded and the whole thing tugs you along.
A bass player doing the drummer's job
The SLAP bass style began with a missing drummer. Larry Graham was playing bass in a small band with his mother, and when their drummer left he started thumping the strings with his thumb and plucking them with a finger to imitate a kick drum and a snare. He carried the technique into Sly and the Family Stone, and it is now everywhere from funk to modern pop.
These two genres kept giving. Their rhythms became the foundation of disco, and hip-hop producers later built whole new songs on top of old funk records — both of which have their own puzzle on the site.