Motown songwriter who saved Stevie Wonder’s career
Sylvia Moy 1938-2017
Motown’s first female producer, Sylvia Moy co-wrote the song that made Stevie Wonder a star. The singer was then 13 years old. A child prodigy billed as “Little” Stevie Wonder, he had toured the “chitlin’ circuit” and, a year earlier, had had a massive hit with Fingertips (1963). But his voice was breaking, his sales were falling, and Motown bosses were on the brink of terminating his contract. Moy begged them to give him one more chance. She and Hank Cosby sat down with the teenager, and together they produced Uptight (Everything’s Alright). It reached No. 3 in the US charts, and launched his adult career. They would go on to collaborate on a slew of hits, including My Cherie Amour, and I Was Made to Love Her.
Born in Detroit in 1938, Sylvia Moy was the daughter of a repairman who had moved up from the Deep South in search of work. “He hobo’ed, he rode the trains, he made his way north,” she told the writer Adam White. “My dad, in his efforts to look for a better way for his family... had practised going without food and water, so that he could come in here and find work. And that’s how my family got here.” (Her parents, she said, were the inspiration for I Was Made to Love Her.) She originally aspired to be a singer-songwriter, and in 1963 Marvin Gaye spotted her performing at Detroit’s Caucus Club. On his recommendation, she was employed by Motown, but the label had plenty of singers. What it needed was songs, for its ever-growing stable, and so she put her own performing ambitions aside, and concentrated on writing, and later producing.
In addition to the hits she wrote with Wonder, Moy wrote (or co-wrote) Martha and the Vandellas’ My Baby Loves Me; This Old Heart of Mine, for The Isley Brothers; and It Takes Two, for Gaye. She earned 15 gold and platinum records for her work with Motown, where she remained until it moved its operations to Los Angeles in 1973. She then signed with 20th Century Records. She also mentored young artists from disadvantaged backgrounds. Wonder never forgot his debt to her: in 2006 he turned up, as a surprise guest, when Moy was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Paying tribute to her after her death, aged 78, he noted that she’d not only written some of the “greatest lyrics”, but had helped make him a “far better writer”, too. “How do you stop loving the ones you loved for a lifetime – you don’t!”