Vintage Motown Records

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When Berry Gordy founded the Tamla and Motown record labels in January and September of 1959 respectively (the Motown Record Corporation itself was not incorporated until the following year), the entrepreneurial songwriter definitely had...
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When Berry Gordy founded the Tamla and Motown record labels in January and September of 1959 respectively (the Motown Record Corporation itself was not incorporated until the following year), the entrepreneurial songwriter definitely had ambitions to spread the music of his hometown of Detroit far and wide. But it's probably a safe bet that even he could not have imagined how quickly the word "Motown" would become synonymous with the soul sound of the 1960s, influencing artists as varied as The Beatles and Dolly Parton. You can track the growth of Motown via the artists it recorded—Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Mary Wells, the Marvelletes, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson Five, the Spinners—as well as the labels on its 45 rpm singles. The 45 rpm labels from 1959 for Tamla and Motown recording artists are similar in style and design. The first Tamla label was yellow, with horizontal lines across the top half of the label, broken by a diamond shape in the label's top-left corner with the word "TAMLA" stacked vertically inside. The first Motown label was peach, with diagonal lines across the top half of the label, broken by a rectangular shape in the label's top-left corner with the word "MOTOWN" stacked vertically inside. Motown 45s were sold in paper jackets of blue or red, with a drawing of a phonograph on them—a round hole in the jacket revealed the label inside the jacket, but positioned on the platter of the record-player drawing. The Tamla label would not change until 1964, and it changed again in 1971, but the label's signature yellow color, tinging to gold, was preserved. More radical was the change to the Motown label in 1966, which incorporated the company's colorful lettering for the label name itself, and featured a map showing the proximity of Detroit to Lake Erie across the label's top two-thirds. That classic Motown...
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