The Motown Matriarch

A ‘GAL FRIDAY’ WHO LATER PRESERVED THE LEGACY

For Motown followers and aficionados, the recent announcement of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s 2024 inductees contained good news. When the ceremonies take place in Cleveland on October 19, creative giant Norman Whitfield will be honoured for musical excellence, while backroom believer Suzanne de Passe will receive the prestigious Ahmet Ertegun award in the non-performer category.

      There was one disappointment: insufficient votes, again, to mandate the Marvelettes’ inclusion. As years pass, it will be more difficult for them to earn their place. And yet the group was the first Motown act to top the pop charts, and that fact – coupled with Mary Wells’ early run of hits – was a significant measure of the company’s progress before the Supremes, the Temptations and others took it further. (Wells is another Rock Hall absentee.)

      That Whitfield should be hailed by the hall has been obvious for years. That de Passe is also now being recognised is a tribute to her energies at Motown (particularly with the Jackson 5) and, later, to how she helped Berry Gordy to realise his movie and TV ambitions. “Every task I ever threw at her,” he declared when the latest honourees were announced, “she not only accomplished but exceeded my expectations in doing so.”

Esther Gordy Edwards: ‘fix this shit’

      It has been noted, too, that less than 10 percent of the Rock Hall inductees to date have been female, so de Passe lends weight on that score.

      Actually, the 41-year-old institution has fallen way short as far as women in the non-performer category are concerned. Given that Atlantic Records’ co-founder, Ahmet Ertegun, originally set up the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, one wonders why Miriam Abramson – Atlantic’s earliest office manager and music publishing chief – has never been inducted. The same applies to Vivian Carter, co-founder of VeeJay Records, and Florence Greenberg, founder of the Scepter/Wand labels. All were influential women in the early years of rock & roll and rhythm & blues, and deserve to be acclaimed in Cleveland.

      Then there’s another office manager…

      Of course, that’s the late Esther Gordy Edwards, whose administrative skills and diligence were foundation stones of Motown, and who, with Thomas “Beans” Bowles, helped to plan and organise the first Motortown Revue. What’s more, she ran the company’s all-important International Talent Management, Inc. (ITMI) division through the ’60s. “Mrs. Edwards is a businesswoman,” Katherine Anderson of the Marvelettes once said, “and being a businesswoman, she had the knack for being able to talk to people, almost like direct.”

      In addition, Edwards chaperoned the teenage Marvelettes (and others) on the road during the early years – and was concerned for their education. On the group’s first visit to Washington, D.C., she took them to visit the U.S. Senate and other government institutions in the capital. “When the Marvelettes released ‘Please Mr. Postman,’ the girls had never been on a bus, let alone a stage,” Edwards later told Record World’s Laura Palmer in a rare trade press interview, “so that was definitely interesting.”

SHINING SHOES IN DOWNTOWN DETROIT

      The broad brushstrokes of Edwards’ career are familiar – not least her vision in securing the legacy of Hitsville U.S.A. by turning its original Detroit HQ into the Motown Museum. So this WGB is devoted to some of her lesser-known moments and accomplishments, drawn from her own recollections and those of others who were close.

      At age 14, Berry Gordy was “the most positive and aggressive person, totally confident,” Edwards explained in Record World. “He had a job shining shoes in downtown Detroit, where he would often be run off the street by older and larger competitors. But the positiveness of him made me want to help the force along, in whatever he wanted to do.” (When Gordy was that young teenager, Edwards was in her early twenties; born in 1920, she was the family’s second child and eldest daughter.)

Berry and Esther in London

      The appeal of her brother’s positivity was most obvious in late ’58 when Edwards, despite reservations about his music industry ambitions, voted with the Gordy family to lend him $800 to launch the record company. “I was his secretary when he was a songwriter for Jackie Wilson, around 1957. During that time, he had many different partnerships, and when he decided to start the company, it began with the personal management of Marvin [sic] Johnson and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I was the gal Friday, secretary and coordinator of that management company.

      “Tamla began first, then Motown. At that point, I was a non-paid employee. I had a business with the family as well as an appointed political position, so consequently I could work free.” By 1960, the firm had become incorporated, but the headcount was still modest. “We had about ten to 15 people on staff. Most of them were recording artists, so I continued to work in all areas, along with my sister Loucye Wakefield, who was Motown’s first sales chief, and my husband, George Edwards, who served as Motown’s first comptroller.” Husband Edwards served others, too: from 1955-79, he was an influential member of the Michigan House of Representatives, and at the time of his death in 1980, a House colleague called him “probably the most effective representative of Detroit blacks through most of his career.”

      Likewise, Esther fought for civil rights. In his autobiography, the Four Tops’ Duke Fakir recalled her response to the way in which concert venues were often segregated in America’s South in the early ’60s. At least once, she threatened to cancel Motown tour dates in the region “until y’all fix this shit,” he wrote, adding an anecdote about a concert promoter who had subsequently called Edwards. “He wanted to talk about a spring booking. Esther agreed, she asked him about the seating policy in his theaters. His response was, ‘Well, we kind of worked that out and your people can sit anywhere they want.’ ”

      “There’s no point in saying [discrimination] doesn’t exist,” Edwards told the Detroit Free Press in 1965. “You have to have your own strategies and ways of changing the situation…If you get furious, you don’t solve any problems.”

A jolly moment: Smokey and Esther

      She was also an activist in other spheres, and in 1973, was elected to the board of the Greater Detroit Chamber of Commerce. That prompted a letter of congratulations from L.G. Wood, head of Britain’s EMI Records, Motown’s longtime international business partner. “This is a great honour,” he observed, “and one which I know is very highly deserved indeed. The more so because you are the first lady ever to be elected to that position, which in itself must speak very highly of your qualification for the responsibility.”

      Eight years earlier, Edwards had put in a good word for an EMI artist, Georgie Fame, with the U.S. immigration authorities, when there were limitations on British acts’ ability to perform in America. “The open door policy which has hitherto existed,” she observed, “has spurred an unprecedented exchange of talent and understanding, an exchange in which Motown Record Corporation is proud to have played a major role.”

      By that point, Edwards’ responsibilities had been broadened to include Motown’s international unit. She, Berry Gordy and sales chief Barney Ales first went to Europe in 1963. Ales once recalled the trip for me, showing video footage of the trio visiting tourist attractions in Paris, and smartly-attired Edwards negotiating with an art dealer at an open-air market. He also remembered a visit outside London where she began throwing snowballs at the A&R executive from Oriole Records, Motown’s then-licensee. On another U.K. expedition, gospel fan Edwards went backstage to visit with singer Marian Anderson, who was performing spirituals in a show there.

      Ales also remembered Edwards’ now-storied inclination to collect all manner of memorabilia, such as dressing-room keys from The Ed Sullivan Show and items once given to staff at a sales meeting in Montreal. “We gave people a ring for coming, like a graduation ring. It was blue and beautiful – and Esther always wanted mine for the museum display in Detroit.

      “Oh, and she was never on time. Berry had a saying, ‘There’s Motown time and there’s Esther time.’ If you had a meeting at 1pm, you had to tell her it was going to be at 12. Even then, she’d be ten minutes late. Wonderful lady, but never on time,” Ales recalled, fondly.

      Edwards’ most enduring legacy remains the Motown Historical Museum, opened as that under her direction in 1985. Later, she said its existence owed more to her reluctance to part with memorabilia than to any corporate plan to preserve the past. For such unwillingness, we are forever grateful.

      She also offered an opinion as to her brother’s accomplishments. “He certainly made real men out of boys, and real women out of girls. Their total development was very obvious under the direction of Berry and Motown. Yet, everybody was great and just so loving and loyal, until it was very easy to take directions and be directed. That is what made Motown a strong and successful situation. We had a whole lot of unity, and it is hard to divide and conquer, so we succeeded because of mutual trust and faith.”