Postman seemed likely to deliver at first. Berry Gordy renamed the foursome The Marvelettes, the resulting single, backed with a song titled So Long Baby, gained a release on Gordy’s Tamla label in July 1961, around four months in the wake of the debut single, I Want A Guy, by Motown’s other female vocal group, The Supremes. Eventually, working with a band rumoured to include 22-year-old drummer Marvin Gaye, whom they regarded as “cute”, they pieced everything together. Motown's First Number 1Ī trip to Motown’s studios, where the girls delighted producers Brian Holland and Robert Bateman with their new song, convinced Young otherwise. Into her place stepped her old schoolmate Wanda Young, who’d left the group to go in to nursing. Dobbins’s place was at her side and a career with a touring vocal group was deemed unthinkable. It would be one of her last actions with the group. Accordingly, she wrote a new set of words overnight, merely retaining the song’s title. Dobbins liked the melody line but gave the lyric a thumbs-down. He handed Dobbins a blues song he’d constructed called Please Mr. Georgia Dobbins knew a man named William Garrett who was a dab hand at putting dots in all the right places on sheet music. As Raynoma Singleton, who was once Mrs Berry Gordy, remembers, “their sound was sweet and young, their look cute and innocent.” But could they come up with original material? They could and would. We began to picture ourselves like The Supremes, who were the company’s girl group.” We met Berry Gordy and The Miracles and it was then I realised the potential of this meeting. As she later recounted, “Until we got to Motown, it still hadn’t reached my mind how important it was. Horton’s lead vocals, in particular reaped praise. The girls – Gladys Horton, Catherine Anderson, Georgia Dobbins, Juanita Cowart and Wanda Young – impressed Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson. “I realised that doing ballads and singing jazz was cool, but I wanted a hit too.” After a discussion with the school principal, The Casinyets were allowed to travel with the three top groups to the Motown audition, where, heavily influenced by The Chantels and The Shirelles, they sang He’s Gone and I Met Him On A Sunday. But their teacher, a certain Mrs Sharpley, heard something in them that augured well for their future. Fourth place in a school talent show hardly marked them down as world- beaters. They did well in the contest, but not well enough. The prize had been an audition with Motown. The four schoolgirls did indeed have America’s biggest-selling single of the moment, yet earlier that year, as a quintet named The Casinyets – shorthand for Can’t Sing Yet – they’d entered a school talent contest and lost. “Reason: they’re all students at Inkster, Mich, High School.” Postman record, The Marvelettes can only work at weekends,” babbled Jet magazine in early December 1961. “Although they’re the hottest female rock’n’roll quartet in the nation with their Please Mr.
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