Hers is a one-name fame. She was in the vanguard of female singers known only by their given names. Before there was Cher, long before Madonna, there was Martha of Martha and the Vandellas.
”It`s a good life,” says Martha Reeves, 51, who still works approximately 42 weeks a year with her original Vandellas, Rosalind Ashford and Annette Sterling.
”It seems that the older the music gets, the more people come out and see us. The music is 30 years old and whenever we perform it, I can be that young again.”
In the 1960s, the era of the Supremes and the Marvelettes, the Vandellas were among the most exciting of all the Motown label`s female groups. Their blues-based, gospel style produced such classics as ”Dancing in the Streets” and ”Heat Wave.”
”When people want to feel good, or remember a certain time in their lives, or party, they`ll think of us-of all the Motown acts,” Reeves says.
”And those of us that are still alive, we`ll still get bookings. Not to play big arenas anymore, but private parties.” She pauses, dragging on a hand-rolled cigarette. ”It seems like we`re all just dying like flies.”
(Motown `60s stars who have died this year are singer Mary Wells and Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations, as well as Earl Van Dyke, keyboard player and band leader, and Gerri Burston, Smoky Robinson`s sister, both part of the Motown music organization.)
The resurgence of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and the group now is called, has been helped by numerous pop culture references in recent years. The Stephen King blood-splattering movie, ”Carrie,” featured their song,
”Quicksand.” In ”Good Morning, Vietnam,” a soundtrack of Martha and the Vandellas singing ”Nowhere to Run” provided a touch of irony. And sitcom TV anchor Murphy Brown, has a picture of the group behind her desk.
”We`re kept in remembrance and I love it,” Reeves says.
”You know, any job is a job,” she says. ”I`ve adjusted my life to show business. I don`t even think the word `tired.` The only time I get tired is when I don`t do what I`m supposed to do-like discipline myself, get the proper rest, eat at the right time. It takes a lot of planning. But if you handle it right, it will take care of you.”
From a very young age, Reeves wanted to sing and so, as the oldest girl and third of 11 children, she was always singing. Her mother, Ruby, loved Billie Holiday and would sing the kids to sleep with church songs. Reeves`
father, Elijah, played the guitar and sang. One of her grandfathers was a Methodist minister and so the family went to church three to five times a week. ”It was always choir practice,” she says.
In Detroit, where she was born in 1941 and grew up, Reeves was singled out in grade school for her voice. When she baby-sat her siblings, she made them sing. (”It paid off, too, because my two backup Vandellas are my sisters Lois and Delphine,” Reeves says.) For a while, her older brothers had a singing group called the Motor City Travellers.
”I was always trying to sing with them and they`d say, `Get out, get out of here` ” Reeves says.
In high school, she was coached by a teacher who had also coached Mary Wilson, who later would become a Supreme, and Bobby Rogers, who later would be known as a Miracle.
After graduating from high school in the late `50s, Reeves formed a singing group with three of her friends-Ashford, Sterling and Gloria Williamson. They called themselves The Del-Phis and they rehearsed every day after work. (At the time, Reeves was employed at a dry-cleaning shop.)
Finally, the Del-Phis managed to make a record on Check-Mate Records, a Chicago-based label and subsidiary of Chess.
”It was called `I`ll Let You Know` and it didn`t sell at all,” Reeves says. ”No, wait-it sold three copies. We all bought one.”
The Del-Phis broke up. ”We were disillusioned and we needed to go on with our lives,” Reeves says. Still, she continued trying to sing in public, entering contests at clubs. It was at one of those local talent shows, which paid $5 to top winner Reeves, that William Stevenson of Motown Records first heard her sing.
”He gave me his card, so the next day I went and quit my job at the cleaners,” she says, ”then I went over to Motown.”
She didn`t quite get the reception that she had been expecting.
Stevenson asked her, ”What are you doing here?” She answered: ”Don`t your remember? You asked me to come. You told me to come and audition.” And he said, ”Well, I thought you`d take the card and call because we only have auditions once a month.”
In 1960 Reeves started answering the phone in the A&R, or artist and repertoire, department. Stevenson gave her that job, she recalls, when ”He said, `I`ll tell you what-answer this phone.` And I did, intelligently.”
She kept at it. ”It was three weeks before my father insisted that I ask for a salary. He said, `You`re not going to get any more of my money to go to that man`s company.` ”
So she asked and she was paid $35 a week. As a reward for following his advice, her father bought her a used Ford.
”It was an old car,” Reeves says, ”but it was something he thought I deserved for taking his advice and standing up for myself.”
After nine months of working at Motown, Reeves was performing duties as executive assistant to Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson and the legendary Motown songwriting team of Lamont Dozier, Brian Holland and Eddie Holland. By then Reeves had recruited two of the Del-Phis, Ashford and Sterling, to provide hand-clapping, foot-stomping and background singing. They filled in sessions with Marvin Gaye, who was recording ”Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” ”Hitch Hike” and ”Pride & Joy.”
By then, they had caught the attention of the Motown executives. Their recording of ”I`ll Have to Let Him Go” was released in September 1962. Before the record`s release, Gordy changed the group`s name from the Del-Phis to Martha and the Vandellas.
And what exactly is a Vandella?
”It`s a made-up word that`s part of the name Della Reese and part of Van Dyke Street, a main street in my neighborhood,” Reeves says.
In 1963, Martha and the Vandellas released a second record, ”Come and Get These Memories.” It was the first song Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote for a women`s group. It became the group`s first hit. By the next year, Martha and the Vandellas had another, ”Dancing in the Streets,” written by William Stevenson and Marvin Gaye.
In 1963 Martha and the Vandellas toured with a star-studded group called the Motown Revue. It included Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Marvelettes, the Miracles, Mary Wells, the Temptations, the Supremes (who had yet to have a hit record) plus a 12-piece band.
They did 94 one-nighters, Reeves recalls, traveling around the country in a bus. ”You never had a place to lie down, you always had to sort of sit at a slant,” she says. ”And it broke my heart to turn my office over to three girls from secretarial college.”
The tour was an education. Martin Luther King Jr. also had taken to the road that year in a bus and the Motown Revue bus was often mistaken for the King tour.
Her group did its own type of race relations work, Reeves says. She remembers performing in the South to audiences that would begin as segregated groups, but ”by the time the music was going and everybody got up out of their seats-well, nobody could remember where they had been sitting. We saw a lot of changes.”
Some of the experiences weren`t pleasant, however.
”It was sort of frightening to get off a bus and have someone meet you with shotgun and tell you to get back on that bus,” Reeves says. ”We saw trees in the South where people had been hung; we saw a lot of frightening things.”
But even during the time of the 1967 race riots, the Vandellas` song,
”Dancing in the Streets” was sung universally, Reeves believes, as ”a song of hope, a song that gave people something to feel good about.”
The success of Martha and the Vandellas continued until the late `60s, through hits like ”Jimmy Mack,” ”I`m Ready for Love” and ”Quicksand.”
”Motown was always like a family, everyone was a member of the family,” Reeves says. ”And that changed, of course, when Berry Gordy and Diana Ross became a couple. The Supremes became Diana Ross and the Supremes. They got more attention, more of the focus.”
Personnel changed in the Vandellas through the early `70s. Eventually, Reeves opted for a solo career. The other Vandellas got married and took on day jobs. Reeves became a single parent with her only child, son Eric.
”My parents helped me a lot with him,” she says. ”And it wasn`t long before the interest in (her singing group) revived. I don`t know if I`d call it nostalgia, exactly. But soon it was enough that we could go back to work as a group, go on singing 42 weeks a year.”
Even with that kind of schedule, Reeves, who still lives in Detroit, also works with blind people and helps rehabilitate youngsters who have been arrested and are on probation. She was also active in raising money for Motown compatriot Mary Wells, who had no health insurance when she was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago.
”My biggest thrill,” Reeves says, ”is that, after years of telling kids that they`ve got to go on to college, now my son Eric-who`s 22 and has been in the military-is going to college himself.”
How does Reeves feel about being a part of a legendary music sound?
”Motown professed itself to be the sound of young America and that`s just about what we were,” she says. ”We saw the good part and the bad part. As for being the stuff of legends-well, a lot of my friends have gone on early. So it`s just a good feeling to be here, doing what I love.”
