Episode one hundred and thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "My Girl" by the Temptations, and is part three of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Yeh Yeh" by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Resources

As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the recordings excerpted in this episode.

This box set is the definitive collection of the Temptations' work, but is a bit pricey. For those on a budget, this two-CD set contains all the hits.

As well as the general Motown information listed below, I've also referred to Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky, and to Smokey Robinson's autobiography.

For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources:

Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.

To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography.

Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown.

I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown.

The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history.

How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier’s autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers’.

And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles.

Patreon

This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?

Transcript

For the last few weeks we've been looking at Motown in 1965, but now we're moving away from Holland, Dozier, and Holland, we're also going to move back in time a little, and look at a record that was released in December 1964.

I normally try to keep this series in more or less chronological order, but to tell this story I had to first show the new status quo of the American music industry after the British Invasion, and some of what had to be covered there was covered in songs from early 1965.

And the reason I wanted to show that status quo before doing this series of Motown records is that we're now entering into a new era of musical segregation, and really into the second phase of this story.

In 1963, Billboard had actually stopped having an R&B chart -- Cashbox magazine still had one, but Billboard had got rid of theirs. The reasoning was simple -- by that point there was so much overlap between the R&B charts and the pop charts that it didn't seem necessary to have both. The stuff that was charting on the R&B charts was also charting pop -- people like Ray Charles or Chubby Checker or the Ronettes or Sam Cooke. The term "rock and roll" had originally been essentially a marketing campaign to get white people to listen to music made by Black people, and it had worked.

There didn't seem to be a need for a separate category for music listened to by Black people, because that was now the music listened to by *everybody*.

Or it had been, until the Beatles turned up.

At that point, the American charts were flooded by groups with guitars, mostly British, mostly male, and mostly white.

The story of rock and roll from 1954 through 1964 had been one of integration, of music made by Black people becoming the new mainstream of music in