Episode 93: “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes

A history of folk music and 500 songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 93.

Please, Mr.

Postman, by the Marvelettes.

When we left the Tamlamotown family of labels a couple of months back, they'd finally had their first big hit with Barrett Strong's Money, and the label was starting to pull together the full creative team that would be responsible for its later successes.

But while money is a great record, it's not a record with what would later become known as the Motown sound.

It sounds far more like a Ray Charles record than the records that would later make Motown's name.

So, today we're going to look at the first number one to come out of Motown, a record that definitely did have the Motown sound and which established the label as the sound of Young America.

Today we're going to look at Please, Mr.

Postman.

The story of the Marvelettes starts with Gladys Horton, who lived in the small town of Inkster in Michigan.

When Horton was only fourteen, she had formed a group called the Delvith Mettes, who made one single, Chickabooma.

Everyone boxed the dance,

That had got a little bit of airplay on local radio, but had otherwise been unsuccessful, and the Delvrid Mets had split up.

But Gladys still wanted to make music, and she started looking around for other people to sing sing with.

One who caught her eye was a young girl who would appear in the high school talent contests, named Georgia Dobbins.

By the time Gladys got to high school herself, Georgia had graduated, but Gladys persuaded her to join a group she put together for her own talent contest entry.

The group she formed originally jokingly named themselves the Cassignettes, because they can't sing yet, and that was the name under which they performed at the talent contest.

There was a reason that Gladys wanted Georgia for this talent contest.

This one had, as its first prize, the chance of an audition at Motown.

Motown was still a small label, but it had started to have hits, and everyone in Michigan with an interest in music knew about Berry Gordy.

In particular, Motown had just released Shop Around by the Miracles.

Smokey Robinson had written that song, and it had been released to no real effect.

The record had been pulled, and another version released.

That had had no no success either, and then at three o'clock in the morning, Barry Gordy had suddenly realised that the record needed a new, faster arrangement.

He'd phoned up Smokey and told him to get the group together and into the studio before he lost the inspiration, even though it was the middle of the night.

They did, and the second version of Shop Around was pulled and replaced with the new third version, which went to number two on the pop charts and sold a million copies.

her side.

She said, Son, you're growing up now.

Pretty soon you'll take a bride.

And then she said, Just because you become a young man now, there's still some things that you don't understand.

Before you ask some girl for a hand now,

keep your freedom for as long as you can now.

But my mama told me, You better shop around.

Oh, yeah, you better

So Motown were now in the big leagues, and the chance of recording for them was an exciting one, and one that the girls, and Gladys in particular, wanted.

The cassignette at this point consisted of Gladys, Georgia, Georgiana Tillman, Catherine Anderson, and Juanita Cowart.

I've also seen Juanita's name reported as Wayanetta, and can't find anything which definitively says which it was.

At the talent show, they sang Maybe by the Chantelles.

The group came forth, but one of their teachers, Shirley Sharpley, knew the person from Motown who was arranging the auditions, and persuaded them to offer auditions to the top five, rather than just to the winners.

The Cassignettes went to their audition, and Motown were interested, but told them they had to come up with something original before they'd be signed.

They went back to Inkster and got to work.

A friend of Georgia, William Garrett, had started a blues song about a postman, and Georgia worked on his idea, writing most of the lyrics and recasting it as something less bluesy.

But then Georgia had to quit the group.

Her father hadn't known she was singing until she brought the record contract home for him to counter sign.

As she was under twenty-one, she needed a parent to sign it, and her mother was too ill.

Her father believed the entertainment industry to be sinful and wouldn't sign.

She was so depressed that she gave up singing altogether, and by her own account didn't sing a note until 1978.

By the time they came back to Motown with the beginnings of a song, Georgia had been replaced by Wanda Young, though the remaining group members were still singing her song.

The song was decent, but it needed work.

The group were assigned to Brian Holland, who had a listen to the song and had a brainwave.

Holland and his brother Eddie were both on Motown staff at the time, but before joining Motown, Holland had been in a group called the Fidelitones.

The Fidelitones had recorded some tracks for Aladdin, produced by Gordy, in the late 50s, but they'd never been released.

Is it too late?

Darling, I still

Holland had stayed in touch with Freddie Gorman, another member of the group.

Gorman still had musical ambitions, and he would pop into Motown every day after he finished work as a postman.

So when Gorman popped in that day, Holland asked him to chip in ideas for the song and use his experience to make it more realistic, though there's nothing much in the finished song that would seem to require expertise.

Gorman became one of five credited writers on the song, along with Holland, Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, and Holland's normal songwriting partner, Robert Bateman, who worked with Holland as a songwriting and production team called Brian Bert.

Before moving into production, Bateman had been a member of the Satin Tones, who had made several unsuccessful records for Motown, including this one that was a knockoff of There Goes My Baby.

Please show some sympathy.

Please

don't know

who

don't know

Sweetest little girl.

The Cassignettes weren't the first girl group to be sang to the label.

Motown had already signed one girl group, a group called the Primettes, who had been renamed and who had so far released two singles.

I

want a

guy

who

love me

one

who will love me

for

complete

But the Supremes, as they were renamed, wouldn't become successful for several years, and were generally regarded as a joke among the Motown staff, who thought, not entirely without reason, that they had been signed more because Berry Gordy was attracted to Diane Ross, one of the members of the group, than because of any talent they had.

One of the girls, though, Florence Ballard, was very popular at Motown, and was generally regarded as being helpful and friendly.

She worked with Gladys on her lead vocal part and helped her craft her performance.

The production that Brian Holland crafted for the song was very heavy on the percussion.

Along with piano player Popcorn Wiley, guitarist Eddie Willis and bass player James Jameson, the backing musicians included a percussion player, Eddie Bungo Brown, and two drummers, the normal session drummer on most of the Motan recordings, Benny Benjamin, and a young man who had been a member of the last line-up of the Moonglows before Harvey Fouquet had moved over to working for the Gordy family labels, and who was now doing whatever he could around the studio, named Marvin Gaye.

There was one final change that needed to be made.

The Cassignettes was obviously a joke name, and they needed a better one.

The name they were eventually given supposedly came after Berry Gordy heard them sing and said, Those girls are marvels.

The Marvelettes were born, and their first single was the catchiest thing Motown had put out to that point.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Please, Mr.

Pohnsman, wait a minute.

I'll take the liberty letter.

The son of the better.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

Please, Mr.

Postman became the second million seller for Motown and its first number one on the pop charts.

It only stayed there for one week, but that one week was all that was needed.

Motown was now a label that everyone in the industry industry had to notice.

And Please Mr.

Postman was the record that saved Motown.

I've talked before about how a hit record could put a small label out of business.

They had to pay for the records to be pressed up and distributed, but it would be many months before the distributors would actually pay them the money they were owed, and many distributors would not pay at all.

They reasoned that a small label wasn't going to be able to do anything about it if they didn't pay, so why bother?

The only leverage a small label with a big hit had was a second big hit.

If they had another record the distributors wanted from them, then they could tell the distributors they wouldn't get it until they paid up.

And after Shop Around sold a million copies, Motown's follow-ups had all sold poorly.

They were running out of money and they needed another hit quickly before they went bankrupt altogether.

Berry Gordy had, early on, given the label a slogan, create, make, and sell, because he wanted to make great records and have them sell a lot of copies.

But around this time, he realised that there was no point in selling the records if they didn't get paid for them.

So, reasoning that create and make were near synonyms, he changed that slogan to create, sell, and collect.

By being a second million seller for Motown, Please Mr.

Postman ensured that they got paid for the first one.

If it hadn't come along, it's possible that Motown would just be a footnote in histories of chess records.

Chess also distributed a handful of records from a small Detroit label owned by Harvey Fouqua's brother-in-law, who co-wrote several hits for Jackie Wilson, before that label went bankrupt.

But as it is, the Marvelettes were now big stars.

For the follow-up, Berry Gordy wanted to do something that was as close to the hit as possible.

This would be the policy from this point on with Motown.

If someone had a hit, the same producers and songwriters would be assigned to come up with something that sounded like the hit, and the artist would only go in a different direction once they stopped having hits with their original formula.

In this case, the Marvelette second single was designed not only to capitalise on their original hit, but on the popularity of the Twist craze, and so they released Twist in Postman.

Now here comes the policeman, a twistin' down the avenue.

Twistin' by the leg.

It is him.

Twisted by the mail stack.

Twistin' down his back.

Cause he's a pretty

Twistin' Postman went top 40, but it didn't do anything like as well as Please Mr.

Postman.

But just as with their first single, one of the group brought in a new song which brought them back to the top 10, if not number one.

This time it was Gladys who came up with a song called Playboy, which Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, and Mickey Stevenson rewrote, and which made number seven on the pop charts and number four on the RB charts.

boy.

Hey boy, get away from my door.

I heard about the lovers you had before.

You took that love for game of joy.

Oh, yeah.

Just the husband running story was all in there.

Meanwhile, Freddie Gorman had continued working with Brian Holland as well and had put out a single under his own name, The Day Will Come.

And the day

will come

Unfortunately, that wasn't a success, and Freddie had to continue on his his post-rounds.

That also meant that his song-writing partnership with Holland came to an end.

Freddy kept finding that when he came round to Hittsville after work, if Brian Holland had had an idea for a song, he'd already finished it, usually with the help of his brother Eddie and their new writing partner, Lamont Dozier.

And there were problems brewing for the Marvelettes, too.

They'd felt all along that they were looked down on a bit by the people from Detroit, who thought of them as kicks from the sticks because they came from Inkster.

They were so self-conscious about this that it led to the first member leaving the group.

They appeared on American Bandstand, and Juanita said that Detroit was a suburb of Inkster, when she'd meant to say that Inkster was a suburb of Detroit.

She felt so bad about this slip-up and the way she was mocked for it that she had a breakdown and ended up leaving the group.

That didn't bother Motown too much.

When Please Mr.

Postman had been a hit but the girls had been at school, it had been suggested that they could just send any five girls out on the road as the Marvelettes, until the girls put their foot down about that.

Not only that, but at one point when Wanda had been pregnant, Motown had replaced her on the road with Florence Ballard from the Supremes.

The contracts for that tour had specified five Marvelettes.

The Supremes were the least successful group on Motown at the time, and the girls got on well with Florence.

If Motown were willing to do that, they were definitely willing to have the group just carry on with one member gun, and just make sure the contract said there would be four Marvelettes.

They carried on as a four-piece group, and had a few more records, mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson, but with others like Mickey Stevenson and Marvin Gaye sometimes contributing.

But while those records did okay on the RB charts, they didn't have much success on the pop charts, mostly getting to around number 50.

At one point, Motown started to wonder if they needed to change things up a little.

They put out a single by the group with Gladys and Wonder singing a dual lead, and with the group joined by Motown's in-house backing vocal group, The Andantes.

The record was put out under the name The Darnells, but was unsuccessful.

To ease

Unfortunately for them, they missed the chance at a really big hit.

Holland, Dojo, and Holland had written a song for them, but Gladys didn't like it.

She thought it was too simplistic.

And so they took it to the group who are still known within Motown as the No Hit Supremes.

We'll be looking at Where Did Our Love Go in more detail next year.

Eddie Holland did co-write a hit for them with Norman Whitfield though, though it wasn't a monster hit like Where Did Our Love Go.

It did give all the girls a chance to have a solo spot, a rarity for them.

That took them back into the top 30 and made the top 5 on the RB chart.

It would be the last hit that they would have with Georgiana in the group though.

She'd been diagnosed with sickle cell anemia as a child, and the constant strain of touring made her more ill.

The tours had been a shock for all of them, to be honest.

Their first major national tour was the first Mototown review in 1962, a tour with a line-up that seems preposterously good these days.

All of Motown's major acts, and several acts that weren't yet major but soon would be, were on the same bill: The Miracles, Mary Wells, The Marvelettes, The Temptations, Marv Johnson, Stevie Wonder, The Contours, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, and singing Sammy Ward.

The girls had grown up in Michigan, and while they had an intellectual understanding that the South was different, they were unprepared for the realities of segregation, of not being able to use public toilets or eat in the same restaurants that white people did.

That was awful enough, but there was also the fact that all those acts were on the same bus, and starting the year before, there had been the phenomenon of Freedom Riders, black people from the north who had been coming down to the south to sit in whites-only seats on greyhound buses to protest segregation.

In several places in the south, the sight of a lot of black people on a bus brought the freedom riders to mind, and people actually took pot shots at the bus.

A couple of years living like that took an immense toll on Georgiana's health, and she started suffering from unexplained fatigue.

Eventually, it was realized that she had lupus, an autoimmune disease which is now largely treatable if not curable, but at the time was often a death sentence.

She retired from music, going to work for Motown as a secretary instead.

She died in 1980, aged only 36.

The remaining three carried on as a trio, and they were about to have a second commercial wind.

After a couple of flop follow-ups to Too Many Fish in the Sea, Smokey Robinson took over their production and decided to start using Wanda as the lead vocalist, rather than Gladys, who had sung lead on their hits up to that point.

Don't Mess With Bill, their their first single of 1966, became their first top 10 pop hit since Playboy in early 1962.

But every time he would

apologise, I love him more than before.

He would say,

girls, take him away.

Robinson also wrote the marvelous, The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game for the group.

You were the kid that I was and

I looked up and I was in your arms,

and I knew I had been captured.

Or at least he wrote it for Wanda.

By this point, while the records were getting released as by The Marvelette, Robinson was only using Wanda for lead vocals, and having the Andantes sing all the backing vocals.

The explanation for this was generally that the group were on tour all the time, and it was easier to make the records without them, and then get Wanda just to sing the lead, and the other members reluctantly accepted that, but it rankled.

There were other problems, too.

Juanita and Georgiana had been the glue holding the group together.

They'd been the ones who had been friends with all the others.

Catherine, Gladys, and Wanda hadn't known each other before forming the group, and they started to discover that they weren't hugely fond of each other now.

At first, they still worked well together, each having their assigned area of responsibility.

Gladys was a combination musical director and choreographer, working out the group's set lists and dance moves.

Catherine was a spokesperson in interviews and looked after the group's money, and Wanda was the lead singer.

This worked for a while, but as Catherine would later put it, when there had been five of them, they'd been friends.

Now they were somewhere between acquaintances and co-workers.

And then in 1967 Gladys decided to leave the group.

This made the group an even lower priority for Motown.

While Wanda was by now the undisputed lead singer, within Motown they were thought of as Gladys' group, as she'd been the leader in the beginning.

Motown did decide to get someone else in to replace her.

They could cope with the group going from five members to four, and from four to three.

Three women, after all, was still a girl group, but once they got down to two members, they needed a third.

Harvey Fouquet suggested Anne Bogan, who he'd discovered a while before and recorded a few duets with.

And what you're gonna get and have.

All I

Anne was a sort of general utility singer around Motown.

She'd sung with the Andantes and the Changers 3, and she'd also gone out on the road with Marvin Gaye, subbing for his duet partner Tammy Temmell, when the latter had become sick with the brain tumor that eventually killed her.

Anne replaced Gladys, and the group made two further albums, and Anne was at least allowed to sing on album tracks.

The group continued having RB hits, but while they kept releasing great records like Destination Anywhere, they were by now barely scraping the hot 100 on the pop charts.

And Wanda was having problems.

She'd been doing too much cocaine and drinking too much, and was starting to act strangely.

Then in 1969, her younger sister was shot dead by her other sister's estranged husband, who seems to have thought he was shooting the other sister.

And to compound matters, while the group were on tour in Europe, someone spiked Wanda's drink.

She was never the same again, and has had mental health problems for the last 50 years.

The group split up, though nothing was announced.

They just didn't get booked on any more tours and went their separate ways.

Bogan went on to join a group called Love, Peace, and Happiness, who had a minor hit with a song that had been, coincidentally, co-written by Catherine, who wrote it for Gladys Knight.

Don't

do wrong,

but you've been gone

for so long,

and I hope

I hope you'll understand.

that group then joined with Harvey Fouqua in a 17-piece funk band called New Birth, with Bogan singing on their hit, I Can Understand It.

Oh, baby,

I can understand it.

Oh,

can you understand it?

Motown decided to give the Marvelettes one more try, and in 1970 they got Wanda In to record an album titled The Return of the Marvelette.

This was a solo album produced by Smokey Robinson, but they did try to get Catherine to appear on the cover photograph.

She told the label that if she wasn't good enough to sing on the record, she wasn't good enough to appear on the cover either.

And so the cover, like the record, only featured Wanda of the original Marvelettes.

Over the next few decades, various groups toured under the Marvelettes name, none featuring any of the original members.

Motown, rather than the women, had owned the group name and had sold it off.

Gladys, Catherine, and Juanita were busy being homemakers, and Wanda and Georgiana were too ill to consider a music career.

Then in the late 1980s, Ian Levine entered the picture.

Levine is a British DJ who at the time owned and ran Motor City Records, which put out new recordings by people who had released records on Motown in the 60s.

He got over a hundred former Motown artists to record for him, and one album he put out was a Marvellettes reunion of sorts.

He managed to persuade Gladys and Wanda out of retirement to make a new Marvellettes album with two new backing vocalists, Echo Johnson and Gene Gene McLean.

The new record was a mixture of remakes of their old hits and new songs by Levine, like Secret Love Affair.

Hiding the fact we're in love with each other.

Trying to conceal we're secret lovers.

Will we go on pretending this secret love affair is awesome?

Wanda was still too ill to perform regularly, but Gladys went out on tour on the Old East Circuit, singing her old hits as Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes, as none of the group owned the original name.

She and Catherine were in the process of suing to regain the name under the Truth in Music Act when she died of a stroke in 2011.

Of the other Marvelettes, Catherine and Juanita are retired, though Catherine still gives regular interviews about her time with the group, and Wanda's mental health has apparently improved enough in the last few years that she can perform again.

They're all apparently happy with their situations now, and don't miss the old life.

They do miss the recognition, though.

For the 25th, 40th, 50th, and 60th anniversary celebrations of Motown, TV specials were produced featuring many of the label's acts and honoring the label's history.

None of the members of the first group to hit number one on the label were invited to be part of any of them.

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