Word: motowners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tabletops, or on dime-store cardboard drums. At nine, he was singing and playing harmonica up and down the Detroit ghetto streets, and being eased out of the church choir for singing rock 'n' roll. Three years later, he had become the "twelve-year-old genius" of Motown Records, the black pop giant. Rechristened Little Stevie Wonder, he was a strutting, shimmying minibopper who rode to the top of the record charts and $1 million in sales with a rhythm-and-blues shouter called Fingertips, Part...
Stevie was the third of six children in a not particularly musical family. He grew up in Detroit in what he likes to call "upper-lower-class circumstances." When he was ten, Stevie was picked up by Motown after a routine audition and subsequently enrolled at the Michigan School for the Blind, where classes were fitted into his career schedule. It would have been a mad life for any child. Stevie spent years on tour with the Motown Revue. Other performers would joke about not wanting to sleep in the hotel room next to his because he would keep them...
...this absence, by a lavish and effective use of mannerisms. The pit band seems more competent, though they tend to drown out some of the weaker voices onstage. The music Jonathan Scheffer and Barry Cohen dreamed up (stole?) for this show is the usual pastiche of everything from Motown to madrigal, with Harry Belafonte thrown in as some sort of transition...
Died. Paul Williams, 34, soulful baritone and original member of the Temptations (/IWant a Love I Can See, For Once in My Life); apparently by his own hand, of a gunshot wound; in Detroit. Williams began recording for Motown in the 1950s with a group called the Primes, whose female counterpart, the Primettes, later became the Supremes. After leaving the Temptations in 1971 for medical reasons, he acted as the group's choreographer...
Heading the list is Los Angeles-based Motown Industries, one of three record companies in the top 100. Started in Detroit 14 years ago by Berry Gordy Jr., Motown last year parlayed its soul singers (Diana Ross, the Temptations) into sales of $40 million. Next is Chicago's Johnson Publishing Co., Inc. (Ebony, Jet, Black Stars), which, with sales of $23 million, is one of eight publishing firms on the list. The smallest firm is Terry Manufacturing Co. of Roanoke, Ala., which has sales of $ 1,000,000 from women's uniforms and sportswear. The list is dominated...