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Board of Education of Topeka school desegregation decision and the new civil rights activism made this a heady time indeed to be an enterprising African American-anything seemed possible. The social change promised by the 1954 Brown v. In 1959, the year Gordy founded Motown, Harry Belafonte became the first African American to produce a Hollywood film, Odds Against Tomorrow, through his own company. Therefore, Gordy was not going into completely uncharted territory as a Black music entrepreneur. Third, by the late 1950s two other Black-owned independent record companies that specialized in rhythm and blues and rock and roll had been enjoying considerable success for nearly a decade-Peacock Records, formed in Houston, Texas, by Don Robey, and Vee Jay Records, formed in Chicago by Vivian Carter Bracken, James Bracken, and Calvin Carter. During the 1950s it was possible for a young entrepreneur with an ear for this music to start a moderately successful independent company producing a sound that appealed to young people and inner-city African Americans. Of the three major recording companies-Columbia, Capitol, and Decca-only the last showed any interest in the exciting new music that would spawn rock and roll. Emerging primarily from inner-city ghettos and popularized by such bandleaders as Louis Jordan and Lionel Hampton, rhythm and blues was almost exclusively recorded by small independent labels. Second, a new urban dance music, rhythm and blues, was ascendant. Jazz had been taken over by a new group of Young Turk stylists calling themselves beboppers, they were inclined to play music for listening rather than dancing. Big musical units were no longer economically feasible. First, after World War II, big-band swing, the dominant popular dance music in the United States during the Great Depression, became passé. A number of factors came together to make Motown’s success possible at this time. In 1959, not long after recording Robinson’s group, the Miracles, for New York-based End Records and establishing Jobete Publishing Company, Gordy began Motown Records (its name derived from Detroit’s nickname, “Motor City”). Despite his success, Gordy remained on the fringes of the popular music business, making very little money, until he discovered William (“Smokey”) Robinson, a Detroit high schooler with a soothing falsetto and an ear for sweet lyrics. Before forming Motown, Gordy tried to make it as an independent songwriter and record producer, cowriting hit songs for Jackie Wilson, another former boxer and Detroiter, and Marv Johnson. Although he could not read music, he demonstrated an unerring ability to gauge whether a song had the elements of popular appeal. He briefly owned a jazz record store, but his true love was songwriting.

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