Lamont Dozier was 20 years old when his wife, Ann, introduced him to Eddie and Brian Holland one day in 1962. She was packing records and doing typing at the offices of Motown Records in Detroit, where the Holland brothers were among many aspirant songwriters and performers vying to come up with the label’s early hits. Lamont, after mopping the floors at another label while trying to get his singing and writing career off the ground, had taken the offer of $25 a week from Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy Jr, the money to be advanced against future royalties. Once he had struck up a working partnership with the Hollands, the trio wrote and produced million-selling songs that would help define popular music in the 1960s.
Dozier, who has died aged 81, played his part in many of the songs that built the Motown legend and which now seem as impervious to the ravages of time as those of Rodgers and Hart or Lennon and McCartney. Holland-Dozier-Holland classics include Heat Wave and Nowhere to Run (with Martha and the Vandellas), Can I Get a Witness (Marvin Gaye), Baby I Need Your Loving, I Can’t Help Myself and Reach Out I’ll Be There (Four Tops), This Old Heart of Mine (Isley Brothers), Take Me in Your Arms (Kim Weston) and a record-breaking string of No 1 hits in the US charts for the Supremes, starting with Where Did Our Love Go in 1964 and including Baby Love, Stop! In the Name of Love, You Can’t Hurry Love and You Keep Me Hangin’ On.
