from “le détroit” · the strait
Berry Gordy quit Northeastern High to box, lost a jazz record store, worked the Lincoln-Mercury line, started Tamla Records with $800 from his family and sold Motown in 1988 for $61 million.
Berry Gordy Jr. wanted to call his label Tammy Records, and the name was taken. So on January 12, 1959, he borrowed $800 from a savings account the Gordy family ran together and started Tamla Records. The first release, Come to Me, went out that January. Motown Record Corporation followed on April 14, 1960. He sold his interests in Motown Records in 1988 for $61 million.
Gordy was born in Detroit on November 28, 1929, the seventh of eight children of Berry Sr. and Bertha Gordy, who came north from Georgia in 1922. He quit Northeastern High in the eleventh grade to box, and by 20 he had won 13 of his 19 professional fights. The Army drafted him in 1951, and he served in Korea with the 3rd Infantry Division and came home in 1953 with a GED.
His first business failed. The 3-D Record Mart sold jazz and handed out 3-D glasses, and the customers wanted R&B. It closed in 1955, and from 1955 to 1957 he worked the line at Ford's Lincoln-Mercury plant, fastening upholstery into the cars.
He quit the plant in 1957 to become a professional songwriter. Jackie Wilson recorded Reet Petite that year, a song Gordy wrote with his sister Gwen and Billy Davis, and it made the UK Top Ten. Lonely Teardrops went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 7 pop. Smokey Robinson of the Miracles pushed him to put out the records himself.
Gordy bought a photographer's house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in mid-1959 and called it Hitsville U.S.A. The studio in back became Studio A, open 22 hours a day and closed only from 8 to 10 in the morning for maintenance. Within seven years Motown owned seven more houses on the block. Shop Around by the Miracles was the label's first record to sell a million copies.
Money (That's What I Want) was the first hit, in 1960, and Please Mr. Postman by the Marvelettes was the first Motown No. 1 on the pop chart, in 1961. From 1961 to 1971 the label logged 110 Top Ten hits. By 1966 Motown took in $20 million a year, and by the end of that year the company had more than 450 employees, with the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder on the label.
Motown announced its move to Los Angeles on June 14, 1972, and Gordy produced Lady Sings the Blues that year. On June 28, 1988, he sold his stake to MCA and Boston Ventures. President Obama gave him the National Medal of Arts in 2016, and he retired in 2019 at 89.
The house on West Grand Boulevard is a museum. Esther Gordy Edwards opened the Motown Museum there in 1985, and in 2007 that stretch of the boulevard was renamed Berry Gordy Jr. Boulevard. Tours paused on January 20, 2026, while the campus grows to 50,000 square feet, with Hitsville NEXT, a recording studio and a theater. It reopens in spring 2027.
Berry Gordy turns 97 on November 28, 2026.
Photo: Berry Gordy Jr., 1998, John Mathew Smith via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
One dispatch a week. No tracking, no filler. Free, always.