Diana Ross Told Berry Gordy to Sign Them. He Almost Said No. D
Diana Ross walked into Berry Gordy’s office in the summer of 1968 with something to tell him. He had not asked her for it. She had gone anyway. She told him there were five boys from Gary, Indiana that he needed to hear. His first response was not enthusiasm. Berry Gordy had built Motown Records from an $800 family loan into the most successful independent record label in American history.
He had signed Diana Ross when she was a teenager. He had signed Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. He had spent 15 years developing one of the sharpest abilities in the American music industry. The ability to hear a voice and understand what it was. Not what it sounded like in a single moment, but what it was.
What it would become. What it was worth. He was not a man who needed other people to tell him what to listen for. He was, in the summer of 1968, also a man with a great deal on his mind. She had encountered the Jackson Five in a context she had not arranged. The Detroit music world in the late 1960s was not large.
And the right people ended up in proximity regularly. She had been in a situation where hearing them was not optional. And she had heard them. And she had watched the specific thing happen that she later spent weeks trying to convey to Gordy. The moment when a room full of people who knew music stopped what they were doing because something was happening that required their full attention.
She had watched Michael Jackson perform. Michael was 9 years old in the summer of 1968. He was the fourth of the five brothers who performed together, the youngest of the performing group, a child who had been on stage before he was old enough to fully understand what a stage was. His father, Joe Jackson, had spent years building the family group with a discipline that was, by any measure, extraordinary in its rigor.
The boys practiced in the family garage on Jackson Street in Gary. They performed local venues, at talent shows, at any occasion that would have them. They had developed, by the time they came to Detroit, the specific kind of polish that comes from years of performing for audiences that cannot be charmed by the fact of your presence, audiences that require you to earn them.
Michael had been earning audiences since he was 5 years old. In Gary, Indiana, in the years when Michael Jackson was growing up, performing was not a hobby. It was the family’s primary project, shaped by Joe Jackson’s conviction that his children had something the world needed to hear. The house on Jackson Street was the center of that project, the garage its rehearsal space, the neighborhood talent shows and church basements its proving grounds.
By the time the family made their way toward Detroit and Motown Records, Michael had already been performing in front of audiences for 4 years. He understood the mechanics of a crowd in the intuitive way that some children understand music before they understand almost anything else. What he did not yet understand was that what he had was unusual.
That was something the adults in the room would have to tell him by their reactions. Motown was preparing to leave Detroit. The company that had defined the sound of black Detroit for the better part of a decade was in the middle of a transition relocating its operations to Los Angeles navigating a music industry that had shifted around it managing the specific pressures that come to any organization that has been extraordinarily successful and must then decide what form its next chapter takes. The Motown sound, that specific produced immaculate architecture of bass and tambourine and orchestral sweetness that had produced more number one singles than any other independent label in American history was beginning to feel like the end of something. The country had changed. The music had changed. Sly Stone and James Brown were doing
things that the careful crossover focused Motown formula had not fully prepared the industry to categorize. What Gordy needed, though he would not have put it exactly this way was not simply a new act. He needed a connection to what was coming next. Diana Ross believed she had found it. His hesitation was not irrational.
Child acts were complicated. They required a different kind of management. Legal structures around minors, school schedules, parental involvement the specific and non-trivial administrative burden of building a professional career around children who were going to grow up and change. Joe Jackson was a formidable presence which Gordy already understood from the conversations that had begun around the potential of the group.
And Motown was in the middle of relocating its offices. There were many things requiring Gordy’s attention. But Diana Ross was one of the things that always required his attention. She had been since the beginning. Their professional relationship, the specific collaboration through which they had built both the Supremes and, in a different sense, each other’s careers, had taught him that she was not someone who came to him with things she had not fully thought through.
She was precise about what she asked for. She had not asked for many things. She was asking for this. The audition process was arranged. It was not a single event. In the way of the Detroit music world of that period, it was a series of encounters over the course of that summer. Informal hearings, arranged settings, the gradual accumulation of information that a decision of that kind requires.
Gordy heard the group. He heard the older brothers. He assessed the arrangements, the stagecraft, the specific professional competence of five children who had been performing for most of their short lives. He was impressed by what he heard. He remained at the level of certainty that he needed before he committed, something short of convinced.
What Diana Ross was trying to describe to Berry Gordy was not polish. Polish she had seen before. What she was trying to describe was something that existed before the polish, beneath it and through it. A quality of the voice itself that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the specific relationship between a person and the music they are making.
She had heard professional singers. She had been one for nearly a decade. She understood what extraordinary sounded like in a technical sense. She understood the specific dimensions of what good meant in the context of professional recording. What she had heard in Michael Jackson was something that those dimensions did not fully cover.
Diana Ross in the years just before the summer of 1968 had been navigating a version of that same dynamic from the other side. She had built something with Berry Gordy and the Supremes that the industry had not predicted and could not entirely account for. And she had developed in the process a specific understanding of what it meant for talent to encounter the right structural support at the right moment.
She understood this not as a theory but as the specific lived experience of having been in that position herself. When she saw Michael Jackson perform, she understood what she was seeing partly because she recognized in it something she had experienced from the inside. She had been that voice in that room.
She knew what needed to happen next. She said, “You need to hear the youngest one.” Gordy heard her. He was not yet convinced, but he heard her. Diana Ross, standing somewhere near the edge of the room, watched his face. She had been waiting for that. She had known from the moment she first heard Michael sing that the argument for signing the Jackson 5 was not something that could be made in words.
The argument was the voice. The voice was the argument. Everything else, her description, her insistence, her use of the trust that Gordy had in her judgment, had been a way of getting Gordy into the room where the argument could make itself. He said, “Yes.” The practical work of signing the Jackson 5 to Motown took months.
There were contract negotiations, financial terms, the complex administrative requirements of a deal involving minors, and a famously forceful father. Joe Jackson negotiated with the specific intensity of someone who understood what he had and was not prepared to give it away cheaply. Gordy negotiated with the specific intensity of someone who had built a company by understanding the value of what he was acquiring.
The process was not simple and it was not fast. But the decision had been made in that room. In the moment when Gordy heard Michael’s voice and understood what he was hearing, then he was in the room when Michael sang. The specific song, the specific occasion within the audition process, the exact moment when Gordy’s position shifted from impressed to certain.
These details are not agreed upon across all the accounts that have emerged in the years since. What is agreed upon is the general shape of the experience, that there was a moment in the course of that summer’s extended evaluation when Gordy heard Michael Jackson’s voice in a way that produced in him the specific recognition that he had only experienced a handful of times in 15 years of signing artists.
The voice of a 9-year-old is not a powerful instrument in the way that an adult voice is powerful. Michael’s voice was not powerful in that sense. What it had was something different and in some ways more rare. A quality of complete conviction of singing as though the song were entirely true, as though the emotional content of the words being sung was not a performance, but a direct report.
It was not perfect in a technical sense. It was something that technical perfection cannot produce. Present. Completely and entirely present. In the specific way that means there is no distance between the person and the thing they are doing. The song was not being performed. It was happening. Gordy had felt this before.
He had felt it with Stevie Wonder. He had felt it with Marvin Gaye. He knew what it was. He did not feel it often. When he felt it, he recognized it. And when he recognized it, he knew what to do. The first Motown single the Jackson 5 released was I Want You Back. It came out in October of 1969. It went to number one in January of 1970.
It sold over 2 million copies. It was followed by ABC, which also went to number one, and then The Love You Save, and then I’ll Be There. Four number one singles in 14 months. Michael Jackson was 11 years old. The album that carried I Want You Back was released under a title that was also a decision.
Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5. It was a marketing choice. Gordy’s understanding that Diana Ross’s name would carry the new act into territories it could not reach on its own. But it was also an accurate one. She had, in the most literal sense, presented them to Gordy in his office before any camera saw it, before any audience heard it, before any record was pressed.
She had been the one who saw it first and made sure the right person was made to see it, too. Berry Gordy in later years described the Jackson 5 signing as one of the clearest decisions he had made once he had heard them. What he was less likely to discuss in retrospect was the distance he had needed to travel to get to that clarity.
The weeks of Diana Ross’s insistence, the practical hesitations, the accumulated professional caution of someone who had learned that being moved was not the same as being right. He had needed Diana Ross to get him into the room. Once he was in the room, the music did the rest. This is the part of the story that the decades of success have tended to obscure.
The origin of everything that followed. The hit records, the television specials, the moonwalk, the global phenomenon is not a stage in Madison Square Garden or a studio in Los Angeles. The origin is a room in Detroit in the summer of 1968 where a 24-year-old woman who understood music said, “You need to hear the youngest one.” And a man who had built his career on understanding music heard her and listened and changed his mind.
The records are still available. You can hear on I Want You Back the specific quality that was in the room in 1968. Not the same as it was in the room, but close enough that the thing Diana Ross heard and could not fully describe is present in the grooves, available to anyone who puts the needle down and lets it play.
She had been right. She had been right from the beginning.
