Motown’s impact on American music is well known, but the label was also significant for introducing to the world to “High Negro Style”
High Negro Style: The Motown Visual Effect
by Mark Anthony Neal
When Berry Gordy founded Motown records in January of 1959, his efforts were little more than a hunch and a hustle. At the time Gordy could not have imagined that his little Detroit-based record company would go on to produce some of the most timeless music of the 20th century. For all of the two-and-a-half minute classics that came off the label’s automobile-like assembly line, there is perhaps no more endearing tribute to Motown than the image of upscale sophistication that so many of the label’s artists embodied during the 1960s. Motown’s “High Negro Style” as former Motown President Andre Harrell would term it, is on full display on the recent release Motown the DVD: Definitive Performances.
Harrell took over the helm of Motown Records in 1995 when the label was well removed from its peak as one of the premier record companies in the country. Harrell was faced with the daunting, and ultimately unsuccessful, task of making the label relevant to an industry that had long passed it by. For many, the label had become strictly a back catalogue brand, most valuable for the potential of endlessly repackaging Motown’s many classic recordings and artists. Though the label boasted the talents of the platinum selling group Boyz II Men on its roster at the time—Harrell’s tenure with the label coincides with the beginning of the group’s descent from the top of the pop charts—the label’s most notable commodity was its tradition and that back catalogue.
To his credit, Harrell understood the value of that tradition and began to place his own stamp on the aging brand as an example of what he called “High Negro”—upscale, urban, urbane and just enough ghetto to remind you that the Detroit housing projects supplied Motown with more than enough talent in the early 1960s. “Ghetto glamour,” as Harrell described “High Negro” style in a 1995 cover story for New York Magazine,” would have been incomprehensible for those audiences who flocked to Motown performances in the 1960s. There’s no denying though, that just below the sheen of respectability and mainstream acceptance that Gordy craved, were the gritty realities of the social world that made his hustle palpable.
Motown the DVD opens with the music of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets,”—a song which co-writer Marvin Gaye always felt had broader political implications in light of the Civil Rights Movement—amid footage of young white Americans on the beach and in their cars listening presumably to the “Sound of Young America” as Gordy often described the label’s sound.
In the 1960s as television had emerged as a particularly volatile site for representations of blackness, images of black civil rights workers clashing with southern segregationists often competed with images of uplift like Dianne Carroll’s Julia, a nattily dressed Nat King Cole and the athletic grace of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. Gordy understood these dynamics better than most, so for many of those first generation of Motown acts, the label, was among other things, a finishing school. In addition to the intricately choreographed Cholly Atkins stage routines, there were etiquette classes. As critical as the rhythm tracks laid down by the Motown’s famed backing musician, The Funk Brothers were to Motown’s success in the 1960s, was making White people comfortable with the Black bodies that emboldened the brand was as critical to Motown’s success
Motown the DVD captures some of the tensions that accompanied Gordy’s attempts to conquer the pop music world. The Contours 1962 appearance on The Hy Lit Show is instructive. Singing “Do You Love Me?”—a song that would be prominently featured twenty-five years later in the film Dirty Dancing—the quartet seems particularly challenged not to engage in the very “dirty dancing” that the song inspired. Only a few years after Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips would court controversy on television, America was not quite ready to see black men doing the same. In comparison, the Temptations’ tightly choreographed routines during their 1964 performance of “My Girl” on Teen Town is a lesson in restraint. “My Girl” was the group’s first major pop hit, and Gordy was understandably cautious in his approach.
When the voluptuous Brenda Holloway appeared on Shivaree in 1964, it was the camera that seemed confused. The camera was still focused on the white Go-Go dancers that were featured weekly, while Holloway was well into the first verse of “Every Little Bit Hurts,” seemingly reluctant about presenting Holloway in her sleeveless leather cat suit. Even when the camera finally settles on Holloway’s figure, albeit briefly, it seems confused as to whether to present a head-shot or a full body view, Holloway’s rather ample hips in tow.
Many of the performances included on Motown the DVD, were lip-synced, highlighting many of the technical issues that producers were faced with when trying to present musical performances via the still evolving medium. Not all of the teen music programs in the era, for example, had production budgets that would allow them to feature live musicians and alternately, many of the fledgling records labels of the era couldn’t afford to hire musicians for one-time appearances. For Gordy such canned performances were useful, because they helped guarantee that the label’s artists would reproduce the very performances that record buyers were familiar with.
The performances of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and The Supremes on The Ed Sullivan Show—the premiere weekly variety show throughout the 1950s and 1960s—and The Mike Douglass Show offer a contrast to the many of the lip-synced performances. Despite having a reputation for possessing a rather saccharine voice, Supremes lead Diana Ross more than makes up with her star power during the group’s performance of “Back in My Arms Again.” And none of made the Motown sound “pop” was lost when the Vandellas donned full-length gowns in front of Sullivan’s house orchestra.
Motown the DVD includes additional footage of the company picnic in 1970, that is as notable for the moments it captures the label’s biggest stars—Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and a young Michael Jackson—alongside the rank-and-file types that were the essence of the operation as it is for the comical narration of then Motown staffer Weldon McDougal III. For all of the label’s achievements, the footage of the picnic is a reminder that above all else, Motown always saw itself as a family.
