It would be an overstatement to say that if it hadn’t been for a teenager from West Point, Motown might never have gotten off the ground.
But it might not be too much of an exaggeration.
Barrett Strong, a Grammy-winning member of the Songwriting Hall of Fame born in the White Station community outside West Point, died Sunday in Detroit at age 81.
He will be remembered as Motown’s first hit-making artist for legendary founder Berry Gordy in 1959, with his recording of “Money (That’s What I Want).” The song reached No. 2 on the R&B charts, providing much-needed capital for the fledgling record company whose list of hits and artists are now legends in their own right.
As a recording artist, “Money” was the only Strong record to chart. As the first Motown hit-maker, he may have been known as a footnote in Motown history.
But his greatest legacy and lasting impact was his songwriting, as he penned some of Motown’s greatest hits for other artists with his songwriting partner, Norman Whitfield. Their string of hit songs in the years Strong worked with Gordy include some of the most familiar in Motown history. Among them: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (recorded by Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Creedence Clearwater Revival); “War” (Edwin Starr); “Smiling Faces Sometimes” (Undisputed Truth); and Temptations hits “Cloud Nine,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” “Ball of Confusion,” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” among others. Strong received a Grammy Award for Best R&B Song in 1973 for “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”
Strong and Whitfield also co-wrote the ballad “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me).”
“The interesting thing about that song that most people don’t know is that Dad wrote that song for my mother,” said his son, Chelson, a hip-hop artist, songwriter and producer based in Los Angeles. “In the original recording, he wrote a line that went, ‘I will always love you, Sandy.’
“I’m sure I wouldn’t be in this business if it wasn’t for his influence, sitting in the recording studio for hours watching him put together incredible music,” he continued. “He was just one of those guys who was always about the music. Even at home when he was communicating with us children, he was always talking in rhymes or making up funny nicknames and talking about concepts, phrasing. And he was a man who stayed working. He recorded his last album, Strong Hold II, in 2010. It’s an amazing album.”
Barrett Strong was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004.
Although he lived in Mississippi just five years — he, his four sisters and parents moved to Detroit in 1946 — he spoke often of his family there, Chelson said.
“He talked about Mississippi a lot,” Chelson said. “He would go back to Mississippi in the summers because our grandfather had a farm there. He kind of got his start in music there.”
Bob Brzuszek, a board member with the Black Prairie Blues Museum in West Point, said he had a conversation with Barrett Strong several years ago.
“I was able to get in touch with his first cousin, Curtis Strong, and he helped me get in touch with Barrett, “ Brzuszek said. “He wanted to talk about his current project mainly, but he did talk about his time in Mississippi. The Strong family was a very musical family and Curtis’ dad, Nolan Strong, was pretty successful as a doo-wop artist in the region back in the ‘50s. Nolan’s sisters had various bands that played in juke joints all around the Southeast. So it’s pretty clear that Barrett was influenced by the music he heard here.”
In the transcript of a 1999 Barrett Strong interview that Curtis Strong shared with Brzuszek, he talked about the precarious early days of Motown as he was recording “Money.”
“Mr. Gordy was still trying to get everything together,” Strong explained in the interview. “I remember loading the recording equipment that Mr. Gordy brought from Bristoe Bryant — who was a gospel disc jockey on WJLB — into this Volkswagen bus, taking it over to the building on the (West Grand) Boulevard, and setting it up in there. I think ‘Money’ was the first song recorded there on that equipment.
“I was playing that piano lick in the studio and Mr. Gordy said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ So they wrote the lyrics and we recorded it. And I remember the company didn’t have the money to hire a drummer, so Brian Holland found a way to make the tom-tom sound by beating on the inside of the skin of a tambourine. I also remember there were two white kids who got off the bus in front of the studio. One was a guitarist and one was a bass player. They came in, sat down and played on the session. Got up, walked away, and I never saw them again.”
Motown took off from there.
Strong may not have made Motown.
But his “Money” kept the lights on — literally.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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