Mary Wilson
Original member of groundbreaking Motown act the Supremes — the most famous girl group in the world
MARY Wilson, who has died aged 76, was one of the original members of the Supremes, widely acclaimed as the ultimate Motown girl group and the only one to compete with the Beatles in the American charts.
With the two other founders, Diana Ross and Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson emerged from a housing project in Detroit in the late 1950s. As the Primettes, they released a handful of singles that all flopped.
Rebranded the Supremes, they had their first hit with their 10th record, Where Did Our Love Go?, which topped the American charts in early 1964. Their follow-up, Baby Love, established them in Britain where it climbed to No.1 that November; it reached No.2 in Ireland.
Their most successful years were the mid-1960s, when they charted with Stop! In The Name Of Love, Back In My Arms Again, I Hear A Symphony (all 1965) and You Can’t Hurry Love and You Keep Me Hangin’ On (both 1966).
In all, the Supremes racked up 12 American No.1 hits. “Looking back now,” Mary Wilson told the music journalist Derek Jewell in 1965, “it seems like we spent seven years sort of half working at our singing before things began to happen.”
They happened with memorable results. With or without Diana Ross — but with Mary Wilson as a constant presence — the Supremes racked up 45 hits between 1962 and 1976. They were the most famous girl group in the world.
The (white) American music critic Susan Whitall thought they were “just such beautiful girls in these beautiful gowns, singing the music that I was listening to all week on the radio… And I’d even think — and this is where it gets interesting racially — Oh, I want to look like Mary Wilson, she’s beautiful”.
The president of the Motown record label, Berry Gordy, wanted to create “the sound of young America”, sophisticated pop music that would cross divides of race and class, and appeal to adults as much as teenagers. To this end, the Supremes were given lessons not only in elaborate dance moves and stagecraft, but also in etiquette and grooming, tutored by former model Maxine Powell.
She would later challenge what she called “the Motown Myth” — the notion that Gordy had simply taken “a bunch of ghetto kids with no class, no style, and no manners, put them through hours of gruelling training… and then — voilà — stars rolled out of Hitsville like cars off an assembly line… Not only is this view incorrect, it’s insulting”.
In 1967, Gordy changed the name of the group to Diana Ross and the Supremes — by then he and Ross were lovers — and Florence Ballard, the original lead singer, was forced out that summer, to be replaced by Cindy Birdsong.
When Ross left in 1970, she was replaced by Jean Terrell. With Terrell as lead singer, the Supremes recorded seven Top 40 hit singles in three years, of which only Stoned Love (1970) reached No.1, in the American R&B chart.
Mary Wilson sang lead or co-lead vocals on several other Supremes releases, including the hits Floy Joy (1971) and Automatically Sunshine (1972), as well as the title track of the 1971 album Touch.
The eldest of three children, Mary Wilson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on March 6, 1944, and the family later settled in Detroit; there, Mary’s mother placed her with an aunt on the Brewster-Douglas housing estate.
Mary was brought up believing that her aunt was her mother, and vice versa. She only discovered the truth as a teenager. “My whole world had been turned upside,” Mary Wilson wrote many years later. “I’d trusted these people, and they had lied to me.”
At Northeastern High School she met Florence
Ballard, who invited her to audition for a sister group to Milton Jenkins’s male vocal trio, the Primes. Joining Florence in the group known as the Primettes, with Diana Ross, Mary defied her mother and left school in 1961 determined to find fame as a singer.
Booked for their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, the Supremes were denied a write-up by their local Detroit newspaper on the grounds that “we can’t put black people on the cover of a TV magazine”.
According to Shelly Berger, who booked out Motown
acts, no black promoter ever made a single offer for the Supremes and by 1965, when they were playing in affluent supper clubs, “it was understood the Supremes’ audience was white”.
Nursing a quiet loathing of the notoriously diva-like Diana Ross, Mary Wilson remained with the Supremes until 1977, when the group disbanded. She subsequently became entangled in a protracted legal battle with Motown over management of the Supremes.
Signing with Motown as a solo artist, she released an eponymous disco-oriented album in 1979. In 1980, Motown dropped her from its roster and she subsequently concentrated on performances in musical theatre.
She also fought two court cases over the use of the Supremes name, prompting her to campaign for legislation prohibiting such usage by impostors.
Mary Wilson released three solo albums, 12 singles and two bestselling autobiographies, Dreamgirl: My Life As A Supreme (1986), and Supreme Faith: Someday We’ll Be Together (1990).
She was inducted along with Ross and Ballard (as members of the Supremes) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.
In 2002 Mary Wilson was appointed by President George W Bush’s secretary of state Colin Powell as a “culture-connect ambassador” for the US State Department.
She created the Mary Wilson/Supremes Gown Collection of stage wear which toured the world. Her fourth book, Supreme Glamour (2019), co-written with Mark Bego, recalled the history of the Supremes and their fashion wardrobe.
Mary Wilson married, in 1974, Pedro Ferrer, with whom she had three children. The couple divorced in 1981. In 1994 her 16-year-old son Rafael was killed when the Jeep Cherokee she was driving overturned. She sustained only minor injuries.