Women of Motown: An Oral History (eBook)

Chapter One

—Mable John—

MABLE JOHN IS THE oldest sibling in the Detroit clan that produced legendary R&B singer Little Willie John, the incendiary performer whose brief career produced such genre-defining classics as “Fever” (covered later by Peggy Lee).

Big sister Mable belongs in the music record books on her own; she was the first female Berry Gordy signed as a solo artist—to Tamla, his start-up label. But she toiled hitless at the hometown company until she left in 1964; it wasn’t until her stint at Stax Records in Memphis that she scored a hit in 1966, with “Your Good Thing (Is About To End).”

In the fifties John toured with her brother Willie, one of the major R&B attractions of the day. In 1969 she went on the road with Ray Charles, as the lead Raelette. She quit Charles’ show one day in 1977, when she says she heard God tell her, “Go home!” The mother of four did, and she became a practicing minister and pastor of her own church in Los Angeles. She also heads up the Joy Community Outreach To End Homelessness charity.

When Mable John visits Detroit in the wintertime, you’re likely to see her swathed in fur, a slight but commanding presence.

There is about her, still, the sleekness of Detroit’s silk-stocking nightclub era, a hint of the glamorous singer who played the Flame Showbar back when girl singers were expected to exude class and sophistication, as well as put over a hot tune.

—Mable John—

I was born in Bastrop, Louisiana. Nobody’s ever heard of Bastrop, it’s so small. And then my mother, father, and I moved to Arkansas. That’s where all of my sisters and brothers were born except two, my two youngest brothers, who were born in Detroit. There are six brothers, and two sisters, under me. Three girls and six boys, and I’m the oldest. Willie [Little Willie John] was the fifth child.

My father worked at a mill where they made paper, in Arkansas. In Louisiana he worked on what they called a log pond, where when they cut the trees, they would put them into a little pond, and they would roll the logs to the other side, to the mill, where they’d go through some kind of conveyor where they’d cut all the bark off the trees, and get the wood ready to make paper. Which is quite interesting in itself, to know how paper is made.

When they moved from Louisiana to Arkansas, my father worked at the paper mill, a larger firm, then a few years later, 1941, we moved from Arkansas to Detroit. My father had heard, when we were in Arkansas, that the automobile factories were open, and he could make more money. He and some friends drove from Arkansas to Detroit. We stayed behind until he arrived and was able to get a job, and he found a house. And I guess it was maybe six months before we followed behind.

We lived at Six Mile and Dequindre Road. At that time there was a project, where the property had been loaned to the city by Henry Ford, and we moved in there, they were brand new (originally built as temporary housing for World War II factory workers). We were all children at that time. I attended Cleveland Intermediate School, and then Pershing High School, which is at Seven Mile and Ryan Road. On Dequindre near Davison was the elementary school some of my brothers and sisters attended.

The whole family—Johns and Robinsons alike—was musical.

On both my mother’s and my father’s side, they loved to play guitars and the piano, and sing. And they did it basically for fun. I had great uncles and cousins in Louisiana who had horses, and they would ride, especially on Saturdays and Sundays, from one farm to the other. All the way they were singing and playing guitar. And of course my mother’s mother was a Methodist lady, and she was always cooking and raising funds somehow for the church, for some mission or women’s auxiliary.

She would have Friday night fish fries, and my uncles made homemade whisky, and the people would drink and sing. My mother learned to play guitar, and my father did, because it was on both sides of my background. They never sang professionally, but when we were little children, just able to walk around, that’s what my mother and father would have us do, sing for fun. They’d work in the fields all week, and on the weekend they ate fish, they drank, and they sang.

My mother never drank, but my father did. He was so talented that he could watch anyone do anything and then he would come home, get my mother’s pots and pans, and make every instrumental sound that he had heard. And he could sing the song. He was very, very talented.

Mable met the formidable matriarch, Bertha Gordy, before she met Berry.

I met his mother when I was a teenager, and I hadn’t finished high school. Mrs. Gordy was one of the founders of Friendship Mutual Insurance Agency, and she would come through the neighborhood knocking on doors and selling insurance. At that time, people would do that. My father never liked talking about insurance, because to him it was making preparations to die, and it put a little fear in him. So when she would stop at our house, they would just be involved in general conversation, because she knew she could not talk to him about insurance.

1959 at the Flame Showbar, Detroit. L-R, Robert Gordy (Berry’s brother), Billie Holiday,

Berry Gordy Jr., Mable John, and unidentified friend. (Courtesy of Mable John)

I wanted a job after school when I went into high school. My father never wanted me to work. But he agreed that Mrs. Gordy could take me into the office and train me. So I started working in her company after school and on the weekends, so that she could give me some clerical experience. Meanwhile, I became so interested in selling and the way that they would train people to sell the insurance that I asked her to please let me sell the insurance. So she would carry me with her.

Later on, after I finished school and I spent two years at Lewis Business College, I kind of lost track of the insurance company. It later merged with Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company. [When] I ran into Mrs. Gordy again, I was grown. She wanted to know what I was doing, and she started telling me that her son Berry was writing songs. He hadn’t had anything recorded, he did not have a company, but he was writing songs and he was trying to get different people to record them. And the person that he knew most of all was [singer and Highland Park native] Jackie Wilson.

So Mrs. Gordy said to me, if you come over to my home one afternoon, I will introduce you to him. I told her I was coaching choirs at my church, and I was the state musical minister; they had five churches in the state of Michigan, and I was going from church to church. One was in Pontiac, one in Flint, one in Inkster, and two in Detroit. So she said, “Well, if you’re doing all of that, why don’t you let my son work with you, and you could make some money singing, because you’re doing this just for free.”

So I went over to their home on St. Antoine and Farnsworth, and met Berry. And of course at that time he was just getting started; Detroit was not even on the map hardly. My brother [Little Willie John] had begun to sing and travel, and he and Sugar Chile Robinson [a Detroit nine-year-old who scored a number four national R&B hit, “Numbers Boogie,” in 1949], they were the only people from Detroit who had made any history musically for Detroit.

Rhythm and blues had not had any claim hardly, and there were no black labels at the time; there weren’t really a lot of black disc jockeys at the radio stations. There were a few, but not a lot. My brother was signed to King Records, and that’s where a lot of the black singers were, at King, because the people at King were blues. At that time they weren’t even calling it rhythm and blues, when Willie and Sugar Chile started. They named it that later when we were getting more black deejays, and when Berry Gordy got more deeply into it.

[Berry] started out as a writer and a coach for new artists. When he began working with me, he only had the Miracles, who had not recorded. A lot of us, we went a few years without a record company. Because he would write the songs, he would coach us, he would play piano for us. When I played my first engagement, he played the piano for me! He played for years until he just decided that he was a crutch for me, and if I was going to make it, I’d need to be comfortable with other musicians.

The last time he played for me was the last show Billie Holiday did, in Detroit [in 1959, at the upscale Flame Showbar], just two or three weeks before she passed away. He put me on that show with her. And Maurice King was the conductor.

Aside from being coached by him, John also worked with Gordy as a sort of de facto assistant. It helped that she had a car.

I was with Berry Gordy when the black disc jockeys’ organization was organized. They used to hold their meetings at a little club on the east side called Lee’s Sensation.

There at Lee’s Sensation, right in the back room, all the black disc jockeys would hold their meetings, and Berry Gordy and I would be there. Because Berry didn’t drive at that time, and didn’t have a car—I don’t know if Berry drives now! He might, I don’t know. Later on, down the years, he had...