Download or read book Life According to Motown written by Patricia Smith and published by Tia Chucha. This book was released on 1991 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The poems in Life according to Motown comprise a snapshot of my life at the time I lived it. They're an outloud rendering of vulnerabilities, triumphs, revelations, secrets, insecurities, rebirths, persistent music and, yes - quite a few missteps"--Page viii.
Download or read book Standing in the Shadows of Motown written by James Jamerson and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1989 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Guitar Book). Bassist James Jamerson was the embodiment of the Motown spirit and groove the invisible entity whose playing inspired thousands. His tumultuous life and musical brilliance are explored in depth through hundreds of interviews, 49 transcribed musical scores, two hours of recorded all-star performances, and more than 50 rarely seen photos in this stellar tribute to behind-the-scenes Motown. Features a 120-minute CD! Allan Slutsky's 2002 documentary of the same name is the winner of the New York Film Critics "Best Documentary of the Year" award!
Download or read book Mary Wells written by Peter Benjaminson and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complete with never-before-revealed details about the sex, violence, and drugs in her life, this biography reveals the incredibly turbulent life of Motown artist Mary Wells. Based in part on four hours of previously unreleased and unpublicized deathbed interviews with Wells, this account delves deeply into her rapid rise and long fall as a recording artist, her spectacular romantic and family life, the violent incidents in which she was a participant, and her abuse of drugs. From tumultuous affairs, including one with R&B superstar Jackie Wilson, to a courageous battle with throat cancer that climaxed in her gutsiest performance, this history draws upon years of interviews with Wells's friends, lovers, and husband to tell the whole story of a woman whose songs crossed the color line and whose voice captivated the Beatles.
Download or read book To Be Loved written by Berry Gordy and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Motown Records and how it changed the course of American music, as told by its founder—“an African American culture hero of historic stature” (The New York Times). Berry Gordy Jr., who once considered becoming a boxer, started a record company with a family loan of $800 in 1959. Gordy’s company, Motown Records, went on to create some of the most popular music of all time. By the time he sold the company nearly thirty years later, it was worth $61 million and had produced musical legends including Jackie Wilson, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson 5. Here, the revolutionary who shattered the color barrier in the American entertainment industry and forever changed the way the world hears music, shares his story of ambition and vision. From humble beginnings, Gordy amassed a fortune and became a musical kingmaker in the cultural heydays of the 1960s and ’70s. Quelling rumors and detailing his relationships with the artists he managed, Gordy pens “a vivid recreation of a great period and a seminal company in popular music” (Kirkus Reviews).
Download or read book Motown written by Gerald Posner and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1959, twenty-nine-year-old Berry Gordy, who had already given up on his dream to be a champion boxer, borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family and started a record company. A run-down bungalow sandwiched between a funeral home and a beauty shop in a poor Detroit neighborhood served as his headquarters. The building’s entrance was adorned with a large sign that improbably boasted “Hitsville U.S.A.” The kitchen served as the control room, the garage became the two-track studio, the living room was reserved for bookkeeping, and sales were handled in the dining room. Soon word spread that any youngster with a streak of talent should visit the only record label that Detroit had seen in years. The company’s name was Motown. Motown cuts through decades of unsubstantiated rumors and speculation to tell the true behind-the-scenes narrative of America’s most exciting musical dynasty. It follows the company and its amazing roster of stars from the tumultuous growth years in Detroit, to the drama and intrigue of Hollywood in the 1970s, to resurgence in 2002. Set against the civil rights movement, the decay of America’s northern industrial cities, and the social upheaval of the 1960s, Motown is a tale of the incredible entrepreneurship of Berry Gordy. But it also features the moving stories of kids from Detroit’s inner-city projects who achieved remarkable success and then, in many cases, found themselves fighting the demons that so often come with stardom—drugs, jealousy, sexual indulgence, greed, and uncontrollable ambition. Motown features an extraordinary cast of characters, including Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder. They are presented as they lived and worked: a clan of friends, lovers, competitors, and sometimes vicious foes. Motown reveals how the hopes and dreams of each affected the lives of the others and illustrates why this singular story is a made-in-America Greek tragedy, the rise and fall of a supremely talented yet completely dysfunctional extended family. Based on numerous original interviews and extensive documentation, Motown benefits particularly from the thousands of pages of files crammed into the basement of downtown Detroit’s Wayne County Courthouse. Those court records provide the unofficial—and hitherto largely untold—history of Motown and its stars, since almost every relationship between departing singers, songwriters, producers, and the label ended up in litigation. From its peaks in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Motown controlled the pop charts and its stars were sought after even by the Beatles, through the inexorable slide caused by their failure to handle their stardom, Motown is a riveting and troubling look inside a music label that provided the unofficial soundtrack to an entire generation.
Download or read book Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah written by Patricia Smith and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of 2013 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry Finalist for 2013 William Carlos Williams Award "Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms Smith’s new book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, is just beautiful—and like the America she embodies and represents—dangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines." —Sapphire "One of the best poets around and has been for a long time." —Terrance Hayes "Smith's work is direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome." —Gwendolyn Brooks In her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "that soul beneath the vinyl." Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She lives in New Jersey.
Download or read book Dancing in the Street written by Suzanne E. Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign. Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.
Download or read book The Story of Motown written by Peter Benjaminson and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motown was part of growing up in the 1960's and 70's. An amazing number of well-known stars worked for Motown: Diana Ross and the Supremes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Jr Walker and the All Stars, Mary Wells, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell, Edwin Starr, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Lamont Dozier, Shorty Long, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Fifth dimension, the Marvelettes, the Contours, the Isley Brothers, the Spinners, the Originals, the Jackson Five, the Commodores, Rare Earth, Rick James, and many others. Most were Motown stars. Many started and ended with Motown. Motown is important for other reasons. A black company, Motown made black music popular among Americans of all ages.
Download or read book Incendiary Art written by Patricia Smith and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category Winner, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Winner, 2018 BCALA Best Poetry Award Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice Finalist, Neustadt International Prize for Literature Winner, 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.
Download or read book Motown and Didi written by Walter Dean Myers and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motown and Didi, two teenage loners in Harlem, become allies in a fight against Touchy, the drug dealer whose dope is destroying Didi's brother, and find themselves falling in love with each other.
Download or read book Close to Death written by Patricia Smith and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 1993 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems that amplify the voices and souls of black men at various stages of their lives, men who always feel as if they are "C2D," close to death.
Download or read book Miles from Motown written by Lisa Sukenic and published by Fitzroy Books. This book was released on 2021-08-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve-year-old Georgia Johnson is sure she can win the "Spirit of Detroit Poetry Contest," judged by her idol, Gwendolyn Brooks. After moving from her beloved Detroit neighborhood to an unfamiliar suburb on the outskirts of the city, Georgia lies to prevent becoming disqualified from the contest (which is for Detroit residents only) by using her aunt Birdie's address. With her older brother deployed to Vietnam, and her family worried about when--or if--he'll make it home, Georgia tries to settle into her new life. But she misses the old--her friend Ceci, the cracks in the sidewalk that used to catch her skates, the hide-and-seek tree, and the deli on the corner. She wonders if she'll ever make new friends or feel like she belongs. To make matters worse, she must also find a way to intercept the contest finalist announcement that will be mailed to Aunt Birdie's mailbox before her family uncovers her deception. During that summer, Georgia discovers her own resiliency in the face of upheaval and the power of truth when lies ring hollow.
Download or read book Dancing in the Street written by Martha Reeves and published by Hyperion. This book was released on 1995-08-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She belted out big hits, including "Heat Wave" and "Dancing in the Street," for Motown Records during its golden years. However, behind the scenes, Martha Reeves took a beating from her once supportive mentor, Berry Gordy, Jr., and her arch rival Diana Ross. As bold and passionate a storyteller as a singer, Reeves tells it all in this fascinating biography. Three 8-page photo inserts.
Download or read book Where Did Our Love Go written by Nelson George and published by Omnibus Press& Schirmer Trade Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of Tamla Mowtown Records, the Detroit hit factory that set the world dancing in the '60s. It presents the stories behind the rise of such all-time great acts as Smokey Robinson, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, The Temptations and the Jackson 5."
Download or read book The Making of Motown written by Duchess Harris and published by ABDO. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motown music emerged in the United States in the 1960s. It launched the careers of many African American musicians. Motown music shaped culture and society during the American civil rights movement. The Making of Motown explores the history and legacy of Motown. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Core Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Download or read book Berry Me and Motown written by Raynoma Gordy Singleton and published by McGraw-Hill/Contemporary. This book was released on 1990 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ex-wife of Motown executive Berry Gordy, Jr., chronicles the years of her tumultuous marriage, her role at Motown, and the evolution of the company from a family business into a faceless corporation.
Download or read book Motown written by Adam White and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, the definitive visual history of Motown, the Detroit-based record company that became a music powerhouse. The music of Motown defined an era. From the Jackson 5 and Diana Ross to Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson, Berry Gordy and his right-hand man, Barney Ales, built the most successful independent record label in the world. Not only did Motown represent the most iconic recording artists of its time and produce countless global hits—it created a cultural institution that redefined pop and gave us the vision of a new America: vibrant, innovative, and racially equal. This new paperback edition of the first official visual history of the label includes a dazzling array of images, and unprecedented access to the archives of the makers and stars of Motown. Extensive specially commissioned photography of treasures extracted from the Motown archives, as well as the personal collections of Barney Ales and Motown stars, lends new insight into the lives of the legends. Motown also draws on interviews with key players from the label’s colorful history, including Motown founder Berry Gordy; Barney Ales; Smokey Robinson; Mary Wilson, founding member of the Supremes; and many more.
