Detroit in the 1960s was an unlikely stage for a production that featured some of the most inspirational love songs ever written. It may seem equally unlikely that most of those songs were written by young black men. Default notions of romance are an awkward overlay to the reality of this city of steel and sweat, Joe Louis and Jimmy Hoffa. Rough? Tanks that rolled off Detroit’s assembly lines and onto Europe’s beaches as liberators returned home twenty years later to quell urban rebellion. But there was no simple way to quiet the musical movement that was surging in the basements and on the street corners of Detroit’s black neighborhoods.

The city vibrated. Every block had a band, it seemed, and on summer nights young men harmonized under the streetlights. Mixed in with homegrown versions of hits by Ben E. King and the Moonglows were original songs penned by the neighborhood tunesmith. Sunday morning you had to arrive early to get a seat at church. Overcome with the spirit, preachers resorted to singing their sermons. At New Bethel Baptist Church you didn’t mind standing for two hours if you could hear the Franklin sisters—Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma—sing “How I Got Over.”

But there was a new sound. As word spread through the neighborhood, teenagers scrambled, high-top shoes and bicycles, to the parking lot of the Bi-Lo Supermarket where on a makeshift stage twelve-year-old Stevie Wonder performed “Fingertips.” Before long, record store clerks were inundated with customers describing, and sometimes attempting to sing, a few bars of the sound they heard on their transistor radios.

These were the 1960s, and poverty, segregation, Vietnam, and nuclear gamesmanship convened in a funnel cloud that threatened to rip through the American fabric. But with the innocence of a first kiss, the poets of Motown conjured up a black Camelot and took America “up the ladder to the roof” for a view of heaven. From rooftops to blue-lit basements they danced, black and white, fast and slow, as young men testified that they would “find that girl if [they] had to hitch hike ’round the world,” and women replied, “ain’t no mountain high enough to keep me from getting to you.” Boys in the ’hood—long typecast as the least productive, most destructive element of society—wrote knowingly and elegantly of life and love. The young women dazzled with a mix of soul and social graces, grace they maintained even when on Southern highways gunshots were directed at the Motown tour bus.

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A sign over the door of the house on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard read Hitsville USA, a slick slogan worthy of the other major presence a half mile down the boulevard, General Motors. Motown’s eagerness to market its own assembly line obscured for some what really went on inside that house. Close observers watched the parade of odd-shaped instrument cases that concealed everything from bongos to bassoons and the procession of young men with skinny ties, cropped hair, and satchels stuffed with staff paper. They were the ones who knew the secret language of song. It was a production line but one that dispensed magic. Names such as Ivy Jo Hunter, Sylvia Moy, Hank Cosby, and Clarence Paul were scarcely noticed by a public in love with the flourish of sequined stars. The songwriters, invisible architects of the Motown sound, assembled the substance of everyday into songs that were at once sophisticated and earthy, personal and universal. In many ways, it was the Great American Songbook of the second half of the century.

Fans may have believed that Diana Ross wrote “You Can’t Hurry Love.” She was convincing. The truth is, before a song reached the artist a songwriter or two had labored over the turn of a phrase, reshaping it until its internal rhythm and contours fit the music like counterpoint. Not long after the spark of an idea had blossomed into a song, it was thrust into the glare of the Hitsville proving ground. Each song had to run the gauntlet of rival songwriters, producers, and the man who started it all: Mr. Gordy, who himself had written a string of hits. Berry Gordy instinctively knew that great music is built from the song up. Songs were placed on trial and any facet, from the euphonics of the words to chord structure, was fair game. Morris Broadnax who, with a teenage Stevie Wonder and Clarence Paul, wrote the masterwork “Until You Come Back to Me,” recalls that “new songs were worked on between Tuesday and Thursday, and on Friday all the songwriters presented their best material to the staff. There was so much great music that you hoped that yours was one of the few chosen on Monday.” Collaboration and competition sharpened the writing. Smokey Robinson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Ashford and Simpson, Strong and Whitfield, and Stevie Wonder would arrive on Fridays and place their latest in the hands of musicians James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Robert White, and Earl Van Dyke—the Funk Brothers. Cutting sessions—jazz musicians’ venerable device for raising the creative bar—found a home in the basement of Hitsville. It was hand-to-hand musical combat and whoever was left standing made a record. 

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The Motown writers responded with songs that transformed the prosaic into the poetic. The girl down the block became a goddess, and the path to her heart, an epic journey. From “Bernadette”: 

And when I speak of you, I see envy in other men’s eyes,
and I’m well aware of what’s on their minds.
They pretend to be my friend, when all the time
They long to persuade you from my side.
They’d give the world and all they own
                        For just one moment we have known.                       

The Motown roster of artists was packed with female vocalists. Men wrote for Mary Wells, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas, and every other woman on the label. Sylvia Moy’s early compositions—“I Was Made to Love Her,” “It Takes Two,” “My Cherie Amour”—did much to establish a standard of idealized romance. To write effectively for female vocalists, the male songwriters were forced to immerse themselves in a woman’s point of view. Women wait for, agonize over, and celebrate love when it finally arrives. The male songwriters rejected Pavlovian swagger; like Marco Polo bearing gifts from a strange land, they delivered to the male vocalists the textures of romance. Gone was the supposed indifference to the joy and pain of love. These writers discovered love as a force of nature, a celestial presence around which pride, reputation, and the grab bag of male defense mechanisms simply orbited. But this was no weak, victim-of-love routine. The men sang songs infused with unmistakable ardor and palpable virility and with the sort of strength that flows from the yin and yang of love. “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” laments, “I know you want to leave me,” and then stiffens, “but I refuse to let you go.” Marvin implored, “Let’s get it on,” but assured “I won’t push you, baby.” When the men expressed overblown confidence, it was as a foil for the failure to win the love of a woman. “Can’t Get Next to You”: “I can live forever if I so desire . . . I can make the grayest sky blue . . . But I can’t get next to you.”

These were strong men who understood the power of love and women’s power in love. Grown men dropped to their knees on stage and wished it would rain. It was this willingness to pierce the façade of male invulnerability that endeared Motown to anyone who had a heart. Smokey: “So, take a good look at my face. / You’ll see my smile looks out of place. / If you look closer, it’s easy to trace / The tracks of my tears.” When it happened, love was strong, supportive, and reciprocal. Lyricist Nick Ashford, as sung by Marvin Gaye to Tammi Terrell: “Like an eagle protects his nest, / for you I’ll do my best, / Stand by you like a tree, / And dare anybody to try and move me.” 

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The legacy of discipline and creative inspiration that defined the early days of Motown is manifest on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and in a series of albums by Stevie Wonder culminating in Songs in the Key of Life. The teenage apostles of boy-girl love became standard-bearers of a spiritual, universal love. For them, soul music had evolved into music of the soul. Their lyrics have become sacred text: “War is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate,” “Love’s in need of love today.” As did John Lennon with “Imagine” and John Coltrane with A Love Supreme, they looked beyond the personal and dreamed.

A Stevie Wonder lyric lamented that love had taken flight “and then a half a mile from heaven” dropped him back to this cold world. Motown’s songs of romance ascended with the promise of change and faded with the onset of cynicism. In the process, the music was itself transformative, inspiring a community defined not by geography, class, or race but by a sense of common experience. The gospel of change that ignited the love affair in black music may have diminished, but for an incandescent moment, Motown celebrated life and love. No one who hears it will ever forget.

Excerpted from half a mile from heaven: the love songs of Motown, introduction to Motown in Love Lyrics from the Golden Era by Herb Jordan (Pantheon Books). Copyright © 2006 by Herb Jordan. All rights reserved. Excerpted by permission of Herb Jordan. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.