Motown legend Martha Reeve is a stubborn kind of gal

Martha Reeves started singing as a teenager with friends in a vocal group, the Del-Phis. Photo / Supplied

During the 10 years she recorded for Motown, Martha Reeves was one of the biggest stars in the label's firmament.

Her hits - including Nowhere to Run, Dancing in the Street and (Love is Like a) Heat Wave - were heady, exuberant records filled with the promise of love and excitement that made you feel glad to be alive.

But the memory that makes Reeves laugh the loudest and warmest is of her first recording session, in 1962, as a backing singer, along with her friends the Vandellas, on Marvin Gaye's first hit single, Stubborn Kind of Fellow.

At the time, Gaye had yet to make his mark as a solo singer at Motown, and was mostly utilising his talents as a drummer.

"I'd never got a good look at Marvin Gaye before then," Reeves says. "He used to wear a hat pulled down over his eyes; he wore sunglasses all the time, and he always had a pipe in his mouth - don't ask me what was in that pipe! You couldn't see how good-looking he was."

But when we went in to sing on Stubborn Kind of Fellow, he took off that hat and those sunglasses and pipe, and we went 'Doop do-doop, wow! Yeah, yeah, yeah!'?"Reeves gives a pitch-perfect rendition of the song's opening chorus, then dissolves into laughter.

"Because he was so fine! I think he was the handsomest man I ever got close to!"Now, 54 years later, the 75-year-old Reeves remains an indomitable, and high-spirited, force: eloquent and opinionated on the subject of Motown, given to gossip and gales of laughter.

Gospel is in Reeves's blood. The third of 11 children, she had a grandfather who was a pastor; a mother, Ruby, who sang in the church choir; and a father, Elijah, who worked as a labourer but also played the guitar, "woodshedding" with John Lee Hooker - Detroit's leading bluesman.

Reeves started singing as a teenager with friends in a vocal group, the Del-Phis, working in various jobs by day and at night singing in Detroit nightclubs - while observing her father's strict rule to be home by midnight.In 1961, after being spotted by Motown's A&R manager Mickey Stevenson, who handed her his business card, Reeves turned up at Motown's Hitsville studio the next morning, not realising she was supposed to arrange an audition.

"He said, answer this phone - it was ringing off the hook - and I'll be right back. And three hours later, when he came back, he gave me the job. I was working in that job for three months before I got paid!"

Founded two years earlier by Berry Gordy, Motown was a family business on the way to becoming a hit factory, quartered in a small two-storey building in a run-down area of Detroit.

Drawing on a well of young talent from around the city, Gordy shaped a creative hothouse of performers, songwriters and producers.
"I didn't meet Berry for three months," Reeves says.

"I just knew that everybody revered him. You'd hear the different producers talking - 'Hey man, Berry really likes it but he says we've got to put horns on it...', do this or that. Everything was moulded to Berry Gordy's taste. He's the man that created the Motown sound.

"Martha and the Vandellas recorded their first single for Motown in 1962, and their first hit came the following year with Come and Get These Memories.
As with every act on Motown, Reeves was put through the label's famous "artist development" process: lessons in singing and music theory with the performance coach Maurice King; choreography classes with Cholly Atkins, a former vaudeville dancer; and etiquette lessons with "Professor" Maxine Powell, Motown's "Miss Manners".

She taught her young charges everything, from which cutlery to use at a formal dinner to how to exit a limousine elegantly.

"I call her professor because she taught us self-worth; she gave us dignity. She'd talk about 'class that would turn the heads of kings and queens' when she was giving us our lessons. We'd all joke about it, but we did perform before kings and queens, lords and ladies - all the royalty of the world."We were the first generation that was allowed to sit at lunch counters as black people, to go in restaurants and hotels.

Berry Gordy knew that many of us came from rough means, and we had to learn how to be socially accepted, because our music crossed over. It wasn't just for black people. Our music was for the world. They perfected us, I'll put it that way. And it was at Berry Gordy's insistence."

Reeves left Motown - or as she puts it, "Motown left me" - in 1972, when her contract expired and the company moved, almost overnight, from Detroit to Los Angeles. "I had been touring England. When I got back I called and asked what was my next assignment, and the receptionist said, 'Girl - don't you know Motown has moved to LA?' That's when I realised my contract was up. I felt deserted.

"I used to be able to get good credit here because I was on Motown. Suddenly I couldn't hardly rent an apartment. But then realised I needed to move to California, too, so that's what I did."

In Los Angeles, Reeves pursued a solo singing career and studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute, which led to film, television and Broadway musical roles.In 1986 she returned to Detroit.

She has been married and divorced twice, and has one son, Eric, who was born in 1970. For four years, between 2005-2009, she served as a city councillor, elected on the slogan "I did it and so can you".

Her one-term tenure ended in controversy when she referred to her position on the City Council as her "second job" [after singing], and drew media criticism for missing crucial council meetings while touring Britain.

For more than 20 years Detroit has been a byword for urban blight, flight and decay, but entrepreneurial investment and a rejuvenation of downtown suggests the city is now starting to turn a corner.

"Somebody asked me, 'Is Detroit coming back?'?" Reeves says. "I don't think it ever went anywhere. Detroit is beautiful!"

For all its problems, one thing remains unblemished in the city's history - and Reeves can take some small credit for maintaining its legacy. Among her contributions as a city councillor was leading a campaign to rename West Grand Boulevard, where Motown's Hitsville studios were located, as Berry Gordy Boulevard.

Nowadays, the old studio is a museum devoted to Motown's accomplishments, the last remaining legacy of the label's enormous contribution to the city.

In 2014, Motown the Musical, which charts the label's rise and which was written and produced by Gordy, had its world premiere in the city. Reeves was among the old stars who gathered on stage that night.

But she strains to be polite about the musical, which plays fast and loose with the facts and concentrates on Gordy's love affair with Diana Ross - or as Reeves puts it "one of the artists that he deserted the rest of the artists for".

She adds: "But I didn't feel bad about that, because if Berry was in love everybody was happy. Because we all loved him so. But when he fell in love with that little skinny girl it was all over for everybody else until Michael Jackson showed up, then Ross kind of loaned some of her fame to him, and Michael became the biggest thing at Motown."
I sense there was no love lost between her and Diana.

"There was never any love there to be lost. We were artists on the same label, but we weren't buddies; we were stablemates. People would think we were girlfriends. Uh-uh - we were not girlfriends - nor boyfriends. We were all talented people on a label headed by a family named Gordy."

The musical even commits what one imagines in Reeves's mind to be the most egregious error - having the Supremes, not the Vandellas, singing behind Marvin Gaye on Stubborn Kind of Fellow.

"They could never have sung back-up on that - they didn't have that soul in their singing. They sang baby songs! I'm being too truthful," Reeves laughs. "I hope this turns out loving, though!"