DANCE FOR JOY
Martha Reeves on the thrill of dancing and why singing must always come from the soul
Ihave been dancing in the street all my life. As a child, my dad worked for the city council of Detroit and he got permission to close off our block with yellow tape, so during the summer we could have street festivals. Everybody had their record-players on their porches; sometimes we’d all tune our radios to the same station, and we would dance every Saturday until midnight.
In 1962, when I was 21, I was working nine to five at the dry-cleaners and would perform in the evenings at the 20 Grand club for five dollars a night. A man called William Stevenson approached me and gave me a card inviting me to audition at the studio of Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records. This was where I cut ‘Heat Wave’ in two takes, which was a song written especially for me and the Vandellas. They had us singing ‘Love is like a heat wave’ even though we recorded it in the middle of winter! But the message came through: this was about love and the effect it can have on you – it can give you a hot flash.
Marvin Gaye wrote ‘Dancing in the Street’ with William Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter, and I went to the studio one day and found Marvin there singing: Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?/ Summer’s here and the time is right… I thought, ‘Oh God, he’s so fine.’ He sang with style – he could sing the National Anthem and make women swoon. If you’ve ever seen him sing, you know exactly what I’m talking about. He saw me there, and he said, ‘Let’s try this song on Martha.’ This man was seeing me, paying attention to me while I was standing there ogling and grinning, having chills and fever listening to him. Marvin, William and Ivy might’ve had the revolution in mind when they wrote ‘Dancing in the Street’, because we as Black people were fighting for freedom. In those days, we performed in front of segregated audiences, standing in front of a Confederate flag and an American flag. But our music made people dance, and as Smokey Robinson said to one crowd: ‘Ain’t nobody was gonna hurt nobody.’ When we sang, we broke that barrier down between Blacks and whites and saw audiences turn into salt and pepper. It was beautiful.
Motown recorded a happy feeling. My mother used to say: ‘Don’t sing a song unless you can feel it,’ and I could put myself into the lyrics. We had love in our songs: we made music to lift people up, to unite them. Our songs make you get along with one another.