NEW YORK – Barrett Strong, one of Motown’s founding artists and most gifted songwriter, who sang the lead on the company’s breakthrough single “Money (That’s What I Want)” and later collaborated with Norman Whitfield on classics like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” War” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” is dead. He was 81.
His death was announced on social media by the Motown Museum on Sunday, which did not immediately provide further details.
“Barrett was not only a great singer and pianist, but he created incredible work with his writing partner Norman Whitfield,” Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a statement.
Strong was not yet 20 when he agreed to let his friend Gordy manage and release his music in the early days of building a recording empire in Detroit. Within a year he was making history as the pianist and singer on “Money,” a million-selling song released in early 1960 and Motown’s first big hit. Strong never again approached the success of “Money” alone, and decades later struggled for credit for helping to write it. But with Whitfield he formed a prolific and diverse songwriting team.
While Gordy’s “Sound of Young America” was criticized for being too smooth and repetitive, the Whitfield Strong team produced hard-hitting and timely work, along with timeless ballads like “I Wish It Would Rain” and “Just My Imagination ( Running Away with Me ).” With “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” they delivered a fast call-and-response hit to Gladys Knight and the Pips and a somber, hypnotic ballad to Marvin Gaye, his 1968 version of Motown’s absolute bestseller.
As Motown became more politically aware late in the decade, Barrett-Whitfield produced “Cloud Nine” and “Psychedelic Shack” for the Temptations, and for Edwin Starr the protest anthem “War” and its much-cited chorus “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”
“With ‘War’ I had a cousin who was a paratrooper who was injured pretty badly in Vietnam,” Strong told LA Weekly in 1999 by shrapnel and was crippled for life. Sitting at home, you talk about it with your family and that inspires you to say something about it.”
Whitfield-Strong’s other hits, mostly for the Temptations, included “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “That’s the Way Love Is,” and the Grammy-winning chart-topping “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” (sometimes spelled ” Daddy Was A Rolling Stone”). Artists who have covered her songs have ranged from the Rolling Stones (“Just My Imagination”) and Aretha Franklin (“I Wish It Would Rain”) to Bruce Springsteen (“War”) and Al Green (“I Can’t Get Next to You”).
Strong spent part of the 1960s recording for other labels, left Motown in the early 1970s and recorded a handful of solo albums, including Stronghold and Love is You. In 2004 he was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, which described him as “a key figure in Motown’s formative years.”
Whitfield died in 2008.
Strong and other Motown writers’ music was later used in the Broadway hit Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations.
Strong was born in West Point, Mississippi and moved to Detroit a few years later. He was a self-taught musician who learned the piano without needing lessons and formed a local gospel group, the Strong Singers, with his sisters. As a teenager he met artists such as Franklin, Smokey Robinson and Gordy, who was impressed by his writing and playing the piano. Ironically, “Money,” with its opening call “The best things in life are free/But you can give them to the birds and bees,” would lead to a fight – for money.
Strong was initially listed among the writers, and he’s often credited with dreaming up the pounding piano riff while jamming to Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” in the studio. But it wasn’t until decades later that he learned that Motown had since dropped his name from the credits, costing him royalties on a popular standard covered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many others, and a memento of John Lennon’s home jukebox . Strong’s legal argument was toned down because it had taken him so long to seek reinstatement of his name. (Gordy is one of the song’s credited writers, and his attorneys claimed Strong’s name only appeared due to a spelling mistake).
“Songs survive people,” Strong told the New York Times in 2013. “The real reason Motown worked was to publish. The records were just a vehicle to get the songs out to the public. The real money is in publishing, and if you have publishing, then hang on to it. That’s what it’s all about. When you give it away, you give away your life, your legacy. When you’re gone, these songs will still be played.”
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