A collection of John Lennon’s favourite Motown songs
Two musical entities were utterly inescapable back in the 1960s.
The first was, of course, The Beatles; the four Merseyside ‘Mop Tops’ who had graduated from being teenage skiffle obsessives to become a cultural phenomenon mobbed everywhere from Tranmere to Tokyo. The other was Motown Records.
Monopolising the musical talent of Detroit, Berry Gordy first established Motown back in 1959, and by the mid-point of the following decade, the label had more power over the weekly pop charts than any other.
Armed with an ever-expanding roster of unbelievable talents, spanning the spectrum from Diana Ross to Little Stevie Wonder, along with a litany of songwriters tasked specifically with conjuring up hit records, Motown witnessed the kind of success that had never been seen before, and hasn’t really been replicated since.
From their very beginning, The Beatles were indebted to the R&B sounds emanating from across the Atlantic, so it is no surprise that they were natural disciples of Motown’s output, long before most people in the UK had ever heard of the label. In fact, the Fab Four became an instrumental aspect of establishing the sounds of Detroit on English soil, covering three different Motown tracks on their 1963 LP With The Beatles, for which Gordy offered them reduced royalty rates.
Naturally, John Lennon’s songwriting was indebted to Hitsville USA, particularly during the pre-LSD days of the Beatles. So, when the songwriter purchased a portable jukebox to lug around on the band’s world tours back in 1965, he outfitted it with 40 of his favourite tracks, and a not-insignificant number of them had their origins in Detroit.
Along with Barrett Strong’s ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, which was not only one of the tracks that The Beatles most regularly covered, but also the very first hit record to be released by Motown, Lennon loaded up five different tracks by The Miracles – although he inexplicably omitted ‘You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me’.
Seemingly, the admiration between Lennon and Smokey Robinson went both ways, with the Motown veteran recalling in a 2010 interview, “One of the things I loved when they became popular was that they were the first really popular white band – or white artists that I had heard – who came right out and said, ‘We grew up and were very influenced by Black music and by Motown’.” That influence is plain to see when looking at Lennon’s listening habits circa 1965.
The Contours’ ‘First I Look at the Purse’ also featured on the jukebox’s tracklisting, filling out the rest of its Motown line-up, but the influence of the label didn’t stop there. Otis Redding’s recording of The Temptations’ Motown masterpiece ‘My Girl’ was also present, as was Edwin Starr’s northern soul favourite ‘Agent Double-O Soul’, released a few years before Starr and the entirety of Ric-Tic Records was poached by Berry Gordy.
Although Lennon reportedly abandoned that jukebox in Abbey Road Studios when he upped sticks and relocated to the United States – which should give some indication of just how portable it ended up being – the influence of the Motown masterpieces encased within it always stuck with him. They were, after all, a crucial part of his songwriting education.
John Lennon’s favourite Motown songs:
- ‘The Tracks of My Tears’ – Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
- ‘First I Look at the Purse’ – The Contours
- ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ – Barrett Strong
- ‘Shop Around’ – The Miracles
- ‘What’s So Good About Goodbye’ – The Miracles
- ‘I’ve Been Good to You’ – The Miracles
- ‘Who’s Lovin’ You’ – The Miracles
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