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Detroit in the Sixties Beyond Motown

© Barney Quick

This site’s previous articles on Detroit have discussed much of the overall r&b environment in that city prior to the 1960s. It was fertile indeed, including as it did the Twenty Grand, The Flame Showbar, The Paradise Theater, The Greystone Ballroom, the blues bars and dens of iniquity along Hastings Street and John R Street, and the discoveries that Johnny Otis passed along to King Records in Cincinnati, such as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and Little Willie John. There was The Bethel Baptist Church, presided over by Reverend C.L. Franklin, who recorded his thunderous sermons for Chess, and who helped launch the careers of Sam Cooke and his own daughters Aretha, Erma and Carolyn. There was the jazz scene, which spawned Tommy Flanagan and Kenny Burrell, among others.

While the Gordy family was building its empire in the midst of this milieu, other centers of Detroit soul were illuminating the nation’s charts and jukeboxes. The array of non-Gordy labels cut some of the most intense, rawboned soul of the time. Some of the careers associated with them span the years from the age of doo-wop to the funk era.

Robert West founded the Lupine label in 1955. He also managed a vocal group, The Falcons, that had been founded by his nephew, Eddie Floyd. The Falcons were active through the mid-sixties. At various times, the group’s lineup included Joe Stubbs (brother of Levi, the Four Tops’ lead singer) and Sir Mack Rice. In 1960, they replaced Stubbs with a local gospel singer named Wilson Pickett. Two years later, they cut their most successful record, “I Found A Love,” a slow shreiker on which the singers were backed by a session unit that would one day be the core of The Ohio Players. Pickett then started shopping a solo demo around, which led to the successful career he’s had for the ensuing decades. Eddie Floyd made Memphis his home, where he cut the classic “Knock On Wood” for Stax.

A female vocal group called The Primettes cut its only single ever for the Lupine label in 1959. Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson changed their name to The Supremes and auditioned for Motown soon afterward.

A New Jersey doo-wop group called The Parliaments had been coming to Detroit to record and sniff out opportunity for a while when they signed with Lebaron Taylor’s newly formed Revilot label in 1966. The group’s leader, George Clinton, whose day job was as the hair-straightening man in a barbershop, was greatly influenced by the tradition of tongue-in-cheek flamboyance in r&b, dating back to the bug-eyed antics of Louis Jordan. The Parliaments cut a gritty, heavily syncopated, and thoroughly up-to-date single in 1967 called “I Just Wanna Testify” that finally gave it a little national attention. Alas, a dispute over rights and ownership of the Parliaments name caused Revilot and the Jersey vocalists to part ways.

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