Motown
Music, Money, Sex, and Power
Chapter 1
Detroit Dreaming
Berry Gordy Jr. was the seventh of eight children, born in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1929, just at the onset of the Great Depression. His father was the son of freed Georgia slaves who had become sharecroppers of a 168-acre patch of barren farmland that had yielded barely enough to keep the family going. Twenty-three children were born there, but fourteen died at or shortly after birth. Those who survived were tough. The mulatto Berry Gordy Sr.—his own father was the child of a slave and her white plantation owner—was a short, wiry man who did not get to high school until he was twenty-two because his family could not spare him from the backbreaking farming.
Berry Gordy Sr. was thirty—mature by local standards—when he married Bertha, a short, cute nineteen-year-old schoolteacher of African and Indian descent. In 1922, three years into their marriage, Gordy made a deal that changed their lives—he sold a load of the farm’s timber stumps for $2,600, a small fortune in rural Georgia. As word of the sale spread, the ...
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