Greetings (This Is Uncle Sam)
MOTOWN AND VIETNAM; TO PROTEST, OR NOT?
“We are at our defense area laying in the prone firing position. My name tag came into view as I laid with my rifle aimed, ready for the order to fire. It was raining. Raindrops made a loud noise as they pelted our steel helmets. It was dark, couldn’t see anything. This time, we got the order to FIRE. All hell broke loose.”
The words are those of Melvin Moy, taken from his 2020 book, Motown & Vietnam. It’s an engaging, personal tale, spanning his upbringing in Detroit in a large family, his ambitions and career in music, and his first-hand experience of America’s catastrophic war in Southeast Asia. (Moy’s sister, Sylvia, is a storied figure in Hitsville history, as a songwriter and as the catalyst for the ascension of Stevie Wonder in the mid-1960s after his post-“Fingertips” slump.)
Think of him as your soldier…
All of this comes to mind today on the 60th anniversary of the incident which was pivotal in the start of the Vietnam War. On August 2, 1964, a U.S. warship was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Within days, President Johnson secured Congressional approval to retaliate, with a resolution which became the legal basis for the United States to prosecute the war, as it then did.
Now we kiss good-bye
You’ll be off to war, the battle's on
I don't wanna cry as I stand
And watch your ship sail on
As few of you will need reminding, that lyrical extract is from “Forget Me Not,” recorded in early 1968 by Martha Reeves & the Vandellas – and co-authored by Melvin Moy’s sister. “Sylvia was pissed off because I was drafted,” he recalls in Motown & Vietnam, “and sent to Vietnam instead of writing songs with her.” Reeves was personally affected, too. “The song hit home for me,” she remembers in her autobiography, Dancing In The Street, “because my own brother Melvin perished as a result of this war.”
They were far from the only individuals in the Motown world affected by the conflict, and many such stories remain untold or hidden, to this day. Others were drafted into the armed forces earlier in the ’60s, not least because of global tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Pete Moore of the Miracles was one; Brian Holland came close, but fatherhood saved him.
Mary Wilson’s younger brother, Roosevelt, was called up and stationed in Vietnam, heightening the Supremes’ awareness of such service – but also offering a promotional opportunity. “The germ of a good human interest story just crossed my mind,” wrote Motown publicist Al Abrams in November 1965 to Van Gordon Sauter of the Detroit Free Press, who was working in Saigon at the time. “Are you aware that Mary Wilson of The Supremes has a brother now serving in Vietnam?” Abrams continued, “This might make for a good local story and would be of interest nationally as well on the strength of the Supremes. We could work something out with Mary by sending him a gift, album, etc., via yourself.” (It’s unknown how, or if, Sauter replied.)
INADEQUATE SECURITY
Late 1965 was also when it was announced that the Supremes and the Four Tops would together perform for U.S. troops at bases in the war zone in January ’66. However, the tour was cancelled, according to Mary Wilson’s Dreamgirl, “when the U.S. Government informed us that they could not provide adequate security.” Yet later in the decade, the Supremes did play military sites in the region. “When we visited hospitals,” she writes, “we were saddened to see so many young men injured, but grateful that our visits could cheer them up.”
The Miracles minus Moore (Pete), drafted
Still, there were awkward moments. In July 1968, when the Supremes publicly endorsed the presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey, they joined a press conference with him in New York. Journalists assembled at the city’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel began asking Diana Ross for specifics about her view of the candidate’s position on the Vietnam War; she stumbled through.
It’s a familiar trope in Motown history that Berry Gordy generally sought to avoid releasing music which was overtly political. Yet he didn’t object to the (rather anodyne) lyrics of “Greetings (This Is Uncle Sam)” by the Valadiers, producing the record himself and releasing it in 1961. That was, of course, before Vietnam became an unsettling, polarising force in American life. When it did, Motown issued a new version of the song, by the Monitors. “The soldiers and the guys who got drafted loved that song,” the group’s onetime lead singer, Richard Street, was quoted as saying in The Complete Motown Singles Volume 6: 1966. “When we’d sing that in a nightclub, they would just stand up and applaud forever.”
Then there are the stories of other recordings, such as “Jimmy Mack,” which Eddie and Brian Holland claim in their memoir was initially turned down by Motown’s Quality Control department “in case it was misconstrued as a Vietnam protest song.” Or could it have been that QC queen Billie Jean Brown just didn’t like it?
Two further tracks by Martha Reeves & the Vandellas have Vietnam connections. The late Lamont Dozier recalled that he once met a 19-year-old who had been drafted. “They were about to ship him out, and his friends asked if I’d host a party for him at my place. A bunch of us got together, but this guy was kind of off in a corner with his girlfriend. He was looking really solemn because he had a feeling that he wouldn’t be returning home.” Later, Dozier thought the youngster must have felt trapped – that is, with nowhere to run. He began shaping a melody, while Eddie Holland wrote the lyrics.
‘PROUD’ TO BE A TOP 30 HIT
The other Reeves recording was “I Should Be Proud,” cut in 1969 and issued early the following year. “It was a song with a strong anti-Vietnam War message,” she later explained, “a narrative story about a soldier coming home in a pine box while the girl singing the song questions the sense of it all.” Reeves contended that “several radio stations were afraid to play it,” although that wasn’t true of broadcasters in New York and Baltimore at least, including highly-rated Gotham soul outlet WWRL-AM. The single was a Top 30 R&B success in Cash Box, although it didn’t chart in Billboard.
Black Forum’s Grammy-winning first release
Later in 1970, another two Motown releases plugged into the nation’s accumulating civil protest and dissent: Edwin Starr’s powerful “War” in June, and Rev. Martin Luther King’s heartfelt Why I Oppose The War In Vietnam in October, which was the first album on Motown’s spoken-word Black Forum label.
Both were Grammy-nominated, with the King LP securing the statuette for Best Spoken Word Recording. Starr had to be satisfied with the biggest-selling record of his career, a chart-topping, worldwide hit which also assured writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong (and Jobete Music) of royalty income for decades – not least from the song’s regular inclusion in Bruce Springsteen’s concert set.
And so to the two warriors of Motown who precipitated and then embodied the creative change which the company underwent – indeed, was obliged to – in the early 1970s. So much has been written about Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder in this regard that any reprise here seems redundant. Aside, perhaps, from the parenthetical note that Wonder’s last album before he turned 21 featured a front-cover image of him in military uniform (and included a song called “Think Of Me As Your Soldier”). In Gaye’s case, the recollections of his Vietnam-serving brother to author David Ritz seem appropriate to reference, given how Frankie’s experience helped to shape the genesis of What’s Going On.
“The death and destruction I saw in Vietnam sickened me,” said Frankie. “The war seemed useless, wrong and unjust. I relayed all this to Marvin and forgave him for never writing to me while I was over there. That had hurt, because he was a big star and none of my buddies believed he was my brother. ‘Wait,’ I told them, ‘he’s going to write me back and prove it to you.’ He never did.”
But the last word deserves to go to Melvin Moy. When stationed in Vietnam, he regularly received new albums mailed by Motown to his tented barracks, to the delight of those he was serving with. “Damn,” said one, “Motown sent you that?” Moreover, it wasn’t just the arrival of cool vinyl from a record company, one that was changing the dynamic of popular music. “People of color were in a battle at home to achieve social and economic success, status and independence,” Moy asserts in his book. “In the eyes of my fellow soldiers, Motown was doing it, big time.”
Music notes: this can’t be the definitive Motown/Vietnam playlist, given that many other songs have an inferred (or oblique) connection to the subject matter. But, with luck, it will serve. And for the sake of variety, there’s the Temptations’ original of “War,” rather than Edwin Starr’s signature smash, plus Bruce Springsteen’s 1985 live recording, complete with impassioned intro.
G.C. notes: the subject of military service came up during a 2001 interview with Motown's G.C. Cameron by David Cole of In The Basement. He was good enough to share some of the recollections of the singer, who joined the U.S. Marines in 1963, right after leaving school. "I was stationed in Okinawa for a while and I did the Mediterranean – all through the Med: Italy, Spain, Greece and all that area – and then to Vietnam. I volunteered to go because I had friends there both black and white that were dying. These were people I had trained with during my whole Marine Corps. profession, and I wanted to be a part of whatever it was that we trained for. So I volunteered, I caught hell when I got there, and there was hell to pay. That was my choice. It was serious combat where I was. Third Battalion, Ninth Marines. There was always blood somewhere."
Oral notes: in addition to Rev. Martin Luther King’s anti-Vietnam speech, Black Forum put out Guess Who’s Coming Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam in 1972, based on interviews given to journalist Wallace Terry. His research also resulted in a book, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, which movie-maker Spike Lee made assigned reading for the actors in his Vietnam film, Da 5 Bloods.