Berry Gordy was born in Detroit in 1929, the seventh of eight children of Berry Sr. and Bertha Gordy, who left Georgia in 1922 for auto industry wages and to escape Ku Klux Klan violence. Records trace his grandfather to a white plantation owner, James Thomas Gordy, and an enslaved woman, Esther Johnson, which makes Gordy a second cousin of President Jimmy Carter. His father ran a grocery, a plastering and carpentry business and a print shop. Gordy dropped out of Northeastern High School in 11th grade to box professionally until 1950, then served in Korea near Panmunjom as a chaplain's assistant who played organ and earned his GED.
Back home in 1953 he opened the 3-D Record Mart, selling jazz records and 3-D glasses, and it failed because customers wanted blues and R&B. He then worked on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line, an experience the episode ties to Motown's production model. Songs for Jackie Wilson, including Reet Petite and Lonely Teardrops, and Etta James's All I Could Do Was Cry made him a hitmaker, and Smokey Robinson pushed him to start his own label. Tamla was meant to be Tammy Records until the trademark proved taken, and his Jobete publishing company let him own both masters and songs.
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles gave the label its first release, Bad Girl, and its first million seller, Shop Around, in 1960.
Maxine Powell taught artists etiquette and Cholly Atkins designed their choreography.
Friday quality control meetings tested singles on cheap speakers built to sound like a car radio.
Gordy fought studio executives to cast Billy Dee Williams in Lady Sings the Blues and fired director Tony Richardson on Mahogany to direct it himself.
He owned a racehorse, Powis Castle, that ran in the Kentucky Derby.
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