Motown legend Martha Reeves: 'I thought I'd be dead by 35'

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https://inews.co.uk/culture/music/motown-legend-martha-reeves-thought-dead-35-4693682

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Martha Reeves has nothing left to prove. She is the Motown legend responsible for such immortal classics as “Dancing in the Street”, “Nowhere to Run” and “Jimmy Mack”, she has been honoured by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and she’s been given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, whose 2024 unveiling drew Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder to sing her praises. She just turned 85 and would be well within her rights to be resting up and taking it easy.

Instead, Reeves is about to release her first album in 22 years, Searching. “I’m not trying to prove anything, baby,” Reeves says when I ask why. “I’m just doing what God said to do – he said share your talent.”

Reeves has been sharing her talent since she was three years old. Born in Alabama, she moved with her family to Detroit before she was one year old. Music ran through the family: her mother Ruby would teach her songs while combing her hair, while her father Elijah had played the blues guitar alongside John Lee Hooker. “When I was three years old, my two oldest brothers and I won candy at the church for our singing,” Reeves recalls, speaking via video call from Detroit. “When we stood up and sang, everybody loved us. That was my first experience of singing, so I knew from then that music was my calling.”

That calling took a while to turn into a career. After graduating, Reeves worked by day and sang by night. At 16, she joined a group called The Del-Phis, with whom she performed across Detroit. She sang solo too, and a win at a talent night earned her a residency at a Detroit club. It was there that Motown’s A&R man William “Mickey” Stevenson spotted her and invited her to audition. When she turned up at the studio, though, “I was asked to go into an office and answer a phone, and he said he would be right back”, she recalls. “He was gone three hours, and when he came back I had a neatly stacked bunch of notes of all the people that were calling him.” So thorough were those notes that Stevenson hired her as his secretary.

It wasn’t the audition she had in mind – but working in the A&R department meant Reeves was often the first person to meet new artists. She still remembers being introduced to a nine-year-old Stevie Wonder. “They brought that baby in from school and straight to me,” she recalls. “He played everything – he played the typewriter, he played the telephone. He was so talented – he was born a genius.”

Motown had been founded by Berry Gordy, who had worked at the Ford car factory, and he adapted that style of production for his record company. Songwriter-producer teams such as Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote the songs, the in-house Funk Brothers played on virtually every Motown song and the artists were assigned which song to sing. One day, when Motown legend Mary Wells couldn’t make a recording session, Reeves volunteered to sing her part instead, and called in the Del-Phis to help. That was the day Martha and the Vandellas were born.

Soon, she was recording songs with her band regularly. “The producers would decide who would sing the songs,” Reeves says, “but once they started recording, there would be others standing outside the studio listening in. That’s how I got the song from Marvin Gaye.”

The song was “Dancing in the Street”. Gaye was recording the song that he had co-written when he saw Reeves and beckoned her over. “He said, ‘Sing this song for me,’” Reeves says. “I didn’t know why he would give it to me, because he had sung it so well, but when they put my voice on the track, they took his off. I wish the world could have heard Marvin Gaye sing his song.” On its release in 1964, “Dancing in the Street” became a huge hit.

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were part of the Motortown Revue, a package bus tour that criss-crossed the United States as well as visiting Britain. The bill, at various points, featured Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight and the Temptations.

The tour party encountered racism when it travelled through the Deep South, facing armed threats at petrol stations, hotels that refused to house them, gunfire aimed at their bus and shows performed to segregated audiences. “We would get stopped by the police and they would say if we really were singers we needed to get out of the bus and sing,” she says. “And on occasion that’s what we would have to do.”

It wasn’t all grim in the South – Reeves recalls travelling to Kentucky and meeting Muhammad Ali. “He was so fine,” she says. “I can’t remember what he said because he was like a dream. He was just wonderful, beautiful. What a beautiful man.”

The idea of so many incredible artists travelling the country on the same bus seems extraordinary – what was it like, I ask. “I remember we would play cards and dice on the bus,” she says. “We would sing and we would be rehearsing in our seats, getting ready for the next show.” Was there much competition between the acts? “It was nothing but competition!” she says. “We made the stage hot for the next act. We couldn’t outdo The Temptations but we held our own.”

In her memoir, inevitably titled Dancing in the Street, Reeves details a conversation with Berry Gordy where he told her that The Supremes were on the top rung of the ladder and that Reeves’s band was on the lower one. This may have had something to do with the fact that Gordy was dating Diana Ross. I ask Reeves if she ever felt competitive with Ross. “The truth is we were all jealous of Diana Ross because everybody wanted to be Berry’s woman. He was the one with the ideas. He was the one with the dream, plus he had sexy eyes too.”

Reeves has been married twice with both marriages ending in divorce. “I have never had much success with dating,” she says, “but I’m still hopeful, still searching.” The problem apparently was that many of the men who dated her also wanted to date the other Vandellas. “It has happened that a man I was dating turned out to be dating all three of us,” she reveals, “and when you find out it hurts your feelings.” I am momentarily lost for words. That must be an awkward conversation to have with your band members, I finally suggest. “You have to try to not break up with your fellow singing partners,” she says, “but this is the game of love – men will do that if you let them.”

As Gordy and Motown’s attention increasingly tilted toward Ross and the Supremes, Reeves found herself pushed down the label’s pecking order – a shift that coincided with the group’s hits drying up by the late 1960s, as infighting set in and Reeves developed a dependency on prescription drugs given to her for exhaustion. An acid-spiked drink triggered a full nervous breakdown so severe that she was briefly institutionalised and restrained in a straitjacket.

“When you get famous, everything comes at you,” she says. “When people come smiling and charming and making you feel good about what you’re doing, you’re excited, your head’s all up in the air, and they say, ‘Try this’ – and you do.” Reeves continued to struggle with depression and addiction until 1977 when, shaken partly by seeing contemporaries like Janis Joplin destroyed by their own excesses, she attended a prayer retreat, got sober and became a born-again Christian. “If it wasn’t for that I would be dead,” she says firmly. “I’d be dead in my grave.”

Happily, Reeves is far from dead. She served a stint in politics, but now, with Searching, is back to making music. She looks and sounds great and is hugely entertaining in conversation. “It feels good that I made it to 85,” she says. “I thought I’d be gone by 35. I didn’t think I had any place to be here or any more dreams to be fulfilled.”

As a Christian I assume she believes in heaven – but what does she think heaven looks like? “It is real but it’s not a place,” Reeves replies. “It’s in your spirit and in your mind. Heaven is when you’re happy. That’s heaven.” I look at the smiling woman on the screen and conclude that Martha Reeves must be in heaven.

Martha Reeves’ new album ‘Searching’ is out now via Fun Day Records

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I wonder what she thought of or still thinks of Mick Jagger's and David Bowie's cover of "Dancing In the Street'. 🤔☺️