Gladys Horton

Lead singer of the Marvelettes who had Motown’s first No 1 with Please Mr Postman but passed on an even bigger hit to the Supremes

Of all the great female singing groups of the 1960s who put the unforgettable beat of Motown on the musical map, the names of Diana Ross and the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas are usually the first to spring to mind.

But the template for them all were Gladys Horton and the Marvelettes, who gave the Motown label its first No 1 hit 50 years ago with Please Mr Postman. Among early fans of the Marvelettes were the Beatles, who covered the song two years later on their second album, with John Lennon taking the lead vocal and reversing the genders.

Horton and the group, which she put together while still at school, went on to enjoy further chart hits with Too Many Fish in the Sea, I’ll Keep Holding On, Don’t Mess With Bill and The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.

The Marvelettes were eventually eclipsed by the Vandellas and the Supremes, and Horton left the group in 1967 to get married. But although Motown produced bigger stars, by then Horton’s place in the history of soul music was secure.

That place might have been even greater, though, if in 1964 the Marvelettes had not turned down the song Where Did Our Love Go. Horton and her colleagues did not think the song had hit potential. It was given instead to the Supremes, and became their first No 1, setting Diana Ross on her way to becoming one of the world’s biggest stars.

Gladys Catherine Horton was born in 1945, according to her family in Gainesville, Florida, although there is some confusion surrounding her early life as she was orphaned at nine months old and grew up in foster care in a number of different towns.

By the time she was 15 , she was living in Inkster, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan’s “motor city” and the heart of the American car industry. Asking her school friends Georgia Dobbins, Georgeanna Tillman, Juanita Cowart, and Katherine Anderson to join her, they formed a vocal quintet the Casinyets — a modest and deliberately humorous name elided from “the Can’t Sing Yets”.

The group soon found the confidence to drop the jokey name and in 1961 entered a talent contest at Inkster high school as the Marvels. The prize was significant: the top three in the contest were all promised an audition with Motown Records, the recently formed Detroit label created by the entrepreneur Berry Gordy, and which would soon go on to live up to the slogan he placed on the lawn outside the company’s offices declaring Motown to be “the sound of young America”.

In the event the Marvels managed only fourth place. Yet they made enough of an impression for the rules to be bent and were given an audition, at which they were put through their paces by the Motown executives Edward Holland and Brian Holland, who went on to become part of the label’s celebrated songwriting team, Holland-Dozier-Holland.

They passed their first test and were given a second audition, this time conducted by Gordy himself and his leading songwriter, Smokey Robinson. Asked if they had any songs of their own, Dobbins remembered a halfwritten tune by a pianist friend, William Garrett. She had never written a song herself but asked Garrett if she could work up his song outline into something the group might perform. According to legend, she reconstructed the song overnight, keeping little more than its title, and the Marvels returned to the Motown studio with Please Mr Postman. Gordy liked what he heard and instructed Brian Holland to rework the song further before the group recorded it in 1961, backed by Motown’s finest session men, known as the Funk Brothers, with Marvin Gaye on drums. Ironically, Dobbins did not sing on the hit that she had had a large part in writing, for her churchgoing father refused to let her remain in the group. She was replaced by Wanda Young.

Berry renamed the group the Marvelettes and their recording of Please Mr Postman, with Horton singing the lead vocal, spent almost four months climbing the Billboard chart, eventually hitting the No 1 slot in late 1961.

Anxious to exploit this success, Motown ill-advisedly got Horton and the group to record a song called Twistin’ Postman as the follow-up. Such a crass cash-in was doomed to failure, and the song made only No 34 in the American charts.

They returned to the charts with minor hits such as Playboy and Beechwood 4-5789 as Horton and the group were given the pick of material by the emerging cream of Motown’s songwriting talent, including Gaye, Robinson and Holland-DozierHolland.

Their progress was stalled by various personnel changes, as first Cowart and then Tillman left the group, reducing the Marvelettes to a trio. But the group’s biggest setback was entirely self-inflicted, when they turned down an opportunity to record HollandDozier-Holland’s Where Did Our Love Go and opted instead for Norman Whitfield and Eddie Holland’s Too Many Fish in the Sea.

It was a fine song and it put Horton and the Marvelettes back in the charts, but the record’s success was easily eclipsed by the Supremes’ version of the song they had rejected.

There were further hits and they returned to the top ten once more in 1966 with Smokey Robinson’s composition Don’t Mess with Bill. There was another big hit the following year with a further Robinson song, The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game. But by now the Marvelettes had been well and truly overtaken by the Supremes and another rising Motown girl group, the Vandellas, led by Martha Reeves.

In 1967 Horton left the group to get married and although they continued, with Anne Bogan taking her place, and had a couple of minor hits, the group broke up in 1970.

Horton later returned to singing in a small way, appearing occasionally as “Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes” and at a number of Motown tribute shows.

She is survived by one son.

Gladys Horton, singer, was born on May 30, 1945. She died on January 26, 2011, aged 65

Very sad - one of my first Motown records

(Had a few 'Gordy records' before this though)