A classic snare riff kicks it off—bah, bada bah-bah bah-bah bah-bah—and a chugging, urgent bass line propels the song forward. Three young women pop out from a wheel well, radiant in skirts and hair bands, beaming smiles and their hit song to a national network-TV audience. The bottle rocket that was Motown had taken flight; their latest single, “Nowhere to Run,” put them at its helm.
The women—Martha Reeves, Betty Kelley, and Rosalind Ashford—were doing their job; later, they would wonder if they had done something no one else had done before.
For the moment, they marched alongside the factory line, lip-syncing to their song blaring over the speakers in the Dearborn Assembly plant, between and among workers fitting and painting body panels to another massive hit, the Ford Mustang. The car factory hummed along. No doubt, millions of Americans hummed along, too.
To hear Reeves tell it, the music video was born the day that short film first aired, on June 28, 1965. But the song had been born in February of that year, 60 years ago this month, when Martha and the Vandellas leaned into their mikes and sang an anthem for a new era.
Motown on lead, Mustang on harmony
The Mustang had, by spring of 1965, already topped its charts. Launched at the New York auto show in April of 1964, it had already become a bestseller, on its way to moving a million units a year.
Berry Gordy’s Motown had become a hit factory, too. Patterned in a way after the assembly plants he’d worked as a young man, Gordy set up his nascent music label by work stations. Songwriters would hand off to the house band (the inimitable Funk Brothers) for arrangements, while artists interpreted and prepared their voices. That sound foundation led to a string of breakout hits that shared an aural landscape and energy that Gordy dubbed “the sound of the future.”
It had taken one of Motown’s quintessential girl groups a little longer to achieve their breakout.The Vandellas had a typical Motown ascendance: They hung out around the Grand Avenue home to the label, hoping to be discovered. Reeves first took a job at Motown as a secretary; combined with Annette Beard and Rosalind Ashford from the local act, the Del-Phis, the group became The Vandellas.
They sang backup on records like Marvin Gaye’s 1962 hit “Pride and Joy,” then saw their own recordings nudge onto the music charts. Then the group recorded its first big hit with 1964’s “Dancing in the Street.” It went to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and earned Motown’s first Grammy nomination.
In February of 1965, with Betty Kelley from the Velvelettes in to replace expecting mother Annette Beard, they laid down what would become “Nowhere to Run.” With its indelible lead-in, Reeves’s soaring lead vocal, and Kelley and Ashford’s hypnotic chorus, the Holland-Dozier-Holland composition captured a powerful pop vibe as well as a unique Detroit sound; the Funk Brothers house band had even used snow chains slapped on the floor to beef up its hallmark sound. Backed with a rollicking, piano-driven B-side, “Motoring,” the song reached #8 on the Hot 100 chart.
Civil rights history, via Motown
The massive hit in hand, Martha and the Vandellas were chosen as one of the groups to perform on a special television show hosted by Murray the K, one of the most popular radio disc jockeys of the day, and one of the first to translate from AM to FM radio. “It’s What’s Happening, Baby” aired on June 28th, 1965, on CBS. Somehow, Murray the K had convinced the Job Corps to sponsor the show, which he punctuated with skits to encourage young Americans to take summer classes and get summer jobs.
It was propaganda, and Motown was on board. Berry Gordy had worked in a Ford plant, and may have leaned on connections to use Dearborn Assembly as the Vandellas’ backdrop. According to Hour Detroit, Lee Iacocca said when asked, “As long as it’s going to support the Mustang, let’s let them do it.”
The spectacular show lineup also included The Ronettes performing “Be My Baby,” Dionne Warwick doing “Walk On By,” The Supremes exhorting us all to “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and Ray Charles, who finished the show with a foot-stomping rendition of “What’d I Say.”
But the first act was all Vandellas. Reeves told the Detroit Free Press recently that she remembered going to the plant very early the morning of filming, so that it could be done during a slower work hour. They didn’t stop the assembly line.
“We just got cursed at a lot by the guys working on the line,” she said, noting that the anger in the workers’ faces can be seen in some shots. “And I mean cursed.”
As it captured an apogee of pop culture, the show resonated for another reason: timing.
It cast Black artists at their pinnacle as the stars, at a fractious and violent but hopeful moment in history. The prior July, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public places, from schools to swimming pools to restaurants and hotels, and banned discrimination in employment. Then, in March 1965, the nation watched news from Selma, Alabama, as “Bloody Sunday” protestors were beaten as they marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward Montgomery.
As the Vandellas cruised around the Rouge, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wended its way down the legislative assembly line, on the way to becoming law in August of that year. The act set out to dismantle the barriers to voting that had been put in place during Jim Crow—to compel states to ensure the principles of liberty and equality enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. As they took over Dearborn Assembly, as Motown acts took over prime-time TV that summer night, the song’s chanted chorus bolded and underscored what was happening all around.
The show’s available on YouTube now, as embedded here—but a much clearer, remastered version now exists on DVD. On the Murray the K archive site, it’s even possible to hear the slam of a Mustang’s door as “Nowhere to Run” blasts inescapably throughout the factory.
The sound of the future
For all the hope etched in those scenes, the reality would be depressingly more difficult. Reeves was onstage when Detroit riots broke out just two years later. The Motown sound was no match for the defeatists who wanted nothing of the Great Society some Americans tried to build.
But the impact of that moment can’t be ignored, though we hear it now more faintly. The show, she told Hour Detroit, “allowed us to be the ladies who did the first music video ever done.” Others have pointed out music-video precursors in the era of silent films, but Reeves is right. The medium mattered.
The moment mattered more. The Vandellas were a gale in full force. Their performance may now be a quaint echo of a time brimming with more hope, when the first snare rolled out of millions of TV sets across the country, some in stark black and white, others in living, vibrant color. But on that night in 1965, Americans didn’t just hear the sound of the future. They could see it.
Plan a visit to Detroit next year, when a vital part of American history gets its due with the opening of an expanded Motown Museum.
