Interview: Martha Reeves, singer

Detroit, Michigan, 1961. Across America, segregation lives on in the Deep South, the civil rights movement is heating up, and John F Kennedy is alive and well in the White House. Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding – none of them has happened yet. Back in Detroit, home of the automobile and a record company on the brink of becoming the sound of young America, a 21-year-old woman with a big voice, big hair and big ideas is on her way to 2648 West Grand Boulevard. She has been given a card by a man called William “Mickey” Stevenson, who saw her singing in a club with a couple of her friends. It turns out he is the A&R director of Motown Records. And she is Martha Reeves.

“I quit my job as a cleaner and was there at 2648 West Grand Boulevard for 9am,” Reeves tells me in a voice so rich and Southern, you could get tipsy on it. It’s a voice full of grit, sass and the history of 50 years singing songs from the gut (Love is a Heatwave, Dancing in the Street, and Jimmy Mack to name but three). It’s early morning in Detroit, where Reeves, now 70, has spent most of her life and she is in fine fettle because a) she’s awake b) it’s Martin Luther King’s birthday and c) this soul queen loves to talk.

“I got off the bus and there was the house, a tiny house with a hand-painted sign saying ‘Hitsville USA’,” she goes on, easing into the story as though it were a favourite chair. In the following decade, this tiny house would produce a whopping 110 top ten hits in the US. “The office had a desk, a telephone with four lines, a clock and a piano. The studio was in the garage. Well, I didn’t know I was supposed to call up and make an appointment. I didn’t know Motown only held auditions every third Thursday. So when William Stevenson asked me what I was doing there, I guess I looked bewildered. So he said, ‘answer this phone for me. I’ll be right back’.”

Two hours later he returned. Reeves had taken 17 messages, tidied the place and paid some musicians. “I was very effective,” she says. “I knew what I was doing and I wasn’t going to leave without getting some kind of satisfaction for my talent.” She became Stevenson’s secretary on the spot and three months later, when Berry Gordy, the head of Motown, heard her singing on a demo, she got her first recording, called in her friends (the Vandellas) and they sang backing vocals for Marvin Gaye.

It was around this time that an eight-year-old boy pitched up at 2648 West Grand Boulevard. “Stev-a-land Jud-kins!” Reeves recalls, relishing each syllable. “He had been discovered playing organ in church and directing an adult choir. Did you hear that?” She pauses for effect. “An adult choir! He was eight! I looked up and saw this beautiful child. He said, ‘I’m Stevie’. I said, ‘I’m Martha’. He came over and started putting his grubby little hands all over my face. He said, ‘you sound like a nice person. Let me see what you look like’. I fell in love ...”

Next, little Stevaland Judkins started grabbing anything to hand, and playing it like an instrument. “He found the telephone and punched a song on it ... we had just got touch tones. I said, ‘stop kid, you could be calling Russia!’ He found a typewriter and started playing rhythms on the ribbon. Those were the days when you could hear a typewriter.” She sniffs to show her distaste for the silence of computer keyboards. “I said, ‘stop kid, you’ll wreck the ribbon’. He found a waste paper basket, turned it upside down, and played it like a drum. I said, ‘stop baby!’ Then he found the piano ...” Did her jaw drop? “No, no, no, no, no,” she protests. “I was singing with him! We got a beautiful sound together, the two of us.” Eventually Berry Gordy came in. “Well, he was standing there with his mouth open,” recalls Reeves with satisfaction. “And afterwards he said, ‘that kid is a little wonder’. And that’s how Stevie Wonder got his name.”

To say Martha Reeves is a gift of an interviewee is like saying Motown put out some pretty good soul music. Reeves is a fully-paid up, don’t-make-’em-like-that-anymore diva, the original soul queen who has survived five decades of showbusiness and has the stories to prove it. “I’ve found that life is a series of tens,” she tells me. “Every decade there is a change in you. At 30 I was a little depressed because I was getting older. At 40 I had a serious nervous breakdown. I slid into 50 real easy. Sixty was a joy. And 70 ... I’m so brilliant I know that I know that I know!”

She plays the part of Motown grandmother to perfection and still loves to perform (on stage and off, I’m quickly realising). “You don’t get tired of beautiful music,” she says when I ask how she has the energy to keep touring at 70. She plays the Arches in Glasgow as part of Celtic Connections this month. “Heatwave is a fountain of youth. I’m young again when I sing it. Dancing in the Street is pure joy. When I hear that music, my heart jumps. And Jimmy Mack could come back or not but I’m still gonna call him.” Even though some of her anecdotes feel a bit too scripted, a bit too perfect, the pay-offs are so fine and so funny that you don’t mind. All that’s left is to sit back and enjoy her life story. And what a life ...

Reeves was born in Alabama during the Second World War, the oldest girl in a family of eleven. By the time she was a year old, the family had moved to Detroit, and by the time she was three she was singing in church with her two older brothers “for candy”. Her grandfather was a Methodist minister and God and music were the order of the day. “Mama taught us to sing,” she explains. “My father played guitar, sometimes with John Lee Hooker ... He was a good old blues guitarist and he had a beautiful voice. And when you hear me attempt a ballad I’m always trying to sound as much like my mama, Ruby, as I can. She had a sweet and lovely voice and idolised Billie Holiday.”

By the time Reeves hit her teens, she had a single ambition: to be a singer. And at Hitsville USA, it wasn’t long before her secretarial duties fell away and she got her contract. These were the days at Motown of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, the Marvelettes, a young Stevie Wonder, a fledgling girl group called the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas. (The Vandellas, by the way, have seen so many changes – more than 100 backing singers, and counting – they make the Sugababes look like stalwarts.

In 1962 Reeves took part in the first Motown Revue, the famed 94-night bus tour across America that took in much of the segregated South. “I was from Alabama so I knew how people acted down there,” she says. “We would visit my grandparents every summer until I was 14. I remember the toilets with ‘white only’ and ‘coloureds only’. I remember the fact that we didn’t leave the farm. But some of my stablemates didn’t know the ignorance and racism. They threw rocks and bottles and vegetables at us. And in the South we faced segregated audiences. Smokey Robinson took on those people with baseball bats. He said, ‘we came here to party and have a good time’. Everyone got up, came together and started dancing. I saw it happen with my own eyes. And when the music stopped no one was sitting where they started out.”

Wasn’t it frightening performing in such a violent, racist environment? “Yes it was,” she replies. “The civil rights movement was kicking off. We were musicians trying to eat but they just saw freedom riders and wouldn’t serve us. We would go to hotels and they wouldn’t let us in. And all because we were African-Americans on a bus. We were shot at, of course we were ... a lot of people got hurt. But we had a winning show and we were talented people. When we got back to Detroit, everybody’s records had charted.”

In 1964, back on West Grand Boulevard, Reeves watched as Marvin Gaye sang a song he had just co-written. She sings it to me now, in the style of the ultimate soul crooner. “ ‘Calling out around the world’,” she trills, “ ‘Are you ready for a brand new beat ... baaabbbby?’ ” She chuckles. “He sang it romantic, of course. There were so many talented artists at Motown that when you recorded there would always be someone standing there saying, ‘if you can’t do that song, I can’. You quickly learnt how to do a song perfectly in two takes.” Gaye suggested they “try it on Martha”. A take later (well two, actually, because the engineer forgot to press ‘record’ the first time) and Hitsville USA had one of its biggest hits. Dancing in the Street, considered to be the anthem of Motown (and the civil rights movement) is now preserved in a time capsule at the Library of Congress alongside Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?

Not long after, Dusty Springfield, an early admirer of the Motown sound in the UK, brought some of its artists over for the first time to appear on one of her specials. “But we met before in Brooklyn,” explains Reeves, which leads to yet another brilliant story. “I had never heard of her but someone pushed me into a room where she was having a fit, throwing china at the wall and screaming profanities. She was angry because her manager had left her alone in America and she had gone to a store, bought some china, and now she was having her own little I’m-gonna-get-this-outta-me party. Well, her hair was mussed up, she had black streaming down her face and she looked rather wild.” What did she do? “I thought it looked fun,” Reeves says. “So I joined her. We had a real good time until eventually she turned around and said, ‘who are you?’ ” Reeves laughs and laughs. “We became instant friends.”

By the late Sixties, things were changing. Rumours abound about the rivalry between Martha and the Vandellas and Diana Ross (who also started out as a Motown secretary) and the Supremes. At the time, critics felt Motown unfairly promoted the Supremes – who had a softer, more poppy style – over the Vandellas, who were the label’s original girl group and considered to have a more raw, gutsy, black sound. When I bring up the question of rivalry, it’s the only time Reeves gets angry. “Our music was before the Supremes,” she interrupts. “We had hits like A Love Like Yours (Don’t Come Knocking Every Day), Nowhere to Run, Heatwave, Quicksand, Jimmy Mack... and then the Supremes happened. Some people remember the history and some people choose to call it rivalry. But there was so such thing. We don’t sound alike. We have our own stage presence, our own talent, and our own success.”

In 1972, as disco was taking over from soul, Motown suddenly moved from Detroit to Los Angeles. By this time Reeves’ contract had ended, she had just had a baby and she was a single parent. No one at the label told her they were leaving the city. “It was a shock,” she admits. “I didn’t have the faintest idea. I had to start my career again and get back on the road. But I continued.” Reeves moved to Los Angeles and MCA Records, where her eponymous solo album was a critical success but a commercial failure. The Seventies, drugs and alcohol took their toll.

“It was a trying time but I survived,” she says. “And it wasn’t all a downer. I met some wonderful people and made some wonderful music. There was more living to do and I did it.” Did she keep in touch with anyone at Motown in those years? “No,” she says after a pause. “It was basically me and the world.”

In 1977, she became a born-again Christian. Why? “I was always a Christian but you can end up straying away and letting the spirit of talent dominate your life,” she says. “I strayed away and went on a... sort of... unorthodox journey. There was a bout with drugs. People bring you gifts, you see, when you get famous. They make it sound so glamorous... it wasn’t so much that it scarred me or that I was hooked, it wasn’t the big bad heroin. It was more a social thing. And I was looking for Mr Right, who I haven’t found...yet.” She laughs, and then gets serious again. “I had to get my spirit back. I never lost the talent but I nearly lost my mind.”

These days, Reeves is “sober as a judge and loving it”. She is also busier than ever. She tours all over the world, often with her sisters as Vandellas, and last year was nominated for two UK festival awards: Best Headliner and Best Feelgood Performance. In 2008 she released her first album in more than two decades, this time on her own label. She also successfully sued Motown for unpaid royalties, though there is clearly no bad blood between them because she took part in the label’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2008 and remains close to all the original crew. In the midst of all this, she even served a term on Detroit’s city council. “We did some great things,” she says, “but I was never really a politician in my heart. I was always a Motown artist. I’m glad to be back in showbusiness full time.” We’re glad to have her back, I reply. “My dear,” she says after a theatrical pause, to get the timing just so. “I never left.”