In 1959, after she had been acting as his chauffeur and general assistant for three years, Mable John became the first female singer signed by Berry Gordy Jr, the founder of Motown Records. “Berry didn’t know how to drive and he didn’t have a car,” she said. Although Gordy acted as her mentor, pianist and songwriter, they were never able to come up with the sort of hits with which Mary Wells, Martha Reeves and Diana Ross, his other female signings, would soon be turning the Detroit-based label into a colossus of the music industry.
John, who has died aged 91, had a voice that was too bluesy, too strong and direct, to suit the lighter, pop-angled records that became, in the label’s slogan, “the sound of young America”. And so, released from her contract in 1966 without rancour on either side, she signed a contract with a rival label. At Stax Records in Memphis she was soon recording the song that made her reputation.
