Motown Records began when Berry Gordy threw his boxing gloves down and abandoned his dreams of being a prizefighter in the late 50s. Berry borrowed $800 from his uncle, rearranged his house on Grand Boulevard in downtown Detroit, and started to audition and sign singers and bands under his new Motown Records label.
Without the writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland we would have never heard those great songs. Over 200 hit records were written by this trio. Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland were not only all born in Detroit (a rarity as many of the Motown artists were born in southern cities and moved to Motown for the jobs), but thankfully they are all still alive today.
All of the Motown songs had one thing in common; they were all backed by the house band known as the ‘Funk Brothers’; Richard “Pistol” Allen, Jack Ashford, Bob Babbitt, Benny Benjamin, Eddie “Bongo” Brown, Johnny Griffith, Joe Hunter, James Jamerson, Uriel Jones, Joe Messina, Earl Van Dyke, Robert White and Eddie Willis.