Episode 93: “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes

Episode ninety-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, and the career of the first group to have a number one on a Motown label. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Take Good Care of My Baby” by Bobby Vee. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum After recording this, I happened to discover that in 2017 Katherine actually came out of retirement and formed a new “Marvelettes”, who recorded in the UK in 2017 with someone called “Hitsville Chalky”.   Resources This week’s Mixcloud playlist is split into two parts, because of the number of Marvelettes songs. Part one, and part two. The Original Marvelettes: Motown’s Mystery Girl Group by Marc Taylor is the only biography of the group. Sadly it currently goes for silly money. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Katherine Anderson Schaffner. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this three-CD set contains the group’s complete discography up to mid-1966 — the Gladys Horton years.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Tamla Motown family of labels, a couple of months back, they’d finally had their first big hit with Barrett Strong’s “Money”, and the label was starting to pull together the full creative team that would be responsible for its later successes. But while “Money” is a great record, it’s not a record with what would later become known as the “Motown Sound” — it sounds far more like a Ray Charles record than the records that would later make Motown’s name. So today, we’re going to look at the first number one to come out of Motown — a record that definitely did have the Motown sound, and which established the label as the sound of young America. Today, we’re going to look at “Please Mr. Postman”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] The story of the Marvelettes starts with Gladys Horton, who lived in the small town of Inkster in Michigan. When Horton was only fourteen, she had formed a group called the Del-Rhythmettes, who made one single, “Chic-A-Boomer”: [Excerpt: The Del-Rhythmettes, “Chic-A-Boomer”] That had got a little bit of airplay on local radio, but had otherwise been unsuccessful, and the Del-Rhythmettes had split up. But Gladys still wanted to make music, and she started looking around for other people to sing with. One who caught her eye was a young girl who would appear in the High School talent contests, named Georgia Dobbins. By the time Gladys got to high school herself, Georgia had graduated, but Gladys persuaded her to join a group she put together for her own talent contest entry. The group she formed originally jokingly named themselves the Casinyettes — because they “can’t sing yet” — and that was the name under which they performed at the talent contest. There was a reason that Gladys wanted Georgia for this talent contest — this one had, as its first prize, the chance of an audition at Motown. Motown was still a small label, but it had started to have hits, and everyone in Michigan with an interest in music knew about Berry Gordy. In particular, Motown had just released “Shop Around” by the Miracles. Smokey Robinson had written that song, and it had been released to no real effect. The record had been pulled, and another version released. THAT had had no success either, and then at three o’clock in the morning Berry Gordy had suddenly realised that the record needed a new, faster, arrangement. He’d phoned up Smokey and told him to get the group together and into the studio, before he lost the inspiration, even though it was the middle of the night. They did, ...