Adam Boulton Diary – Mary Wilson: queen of The Supremes

For me the inevitable cancellation of Diana Ross’s UK tour was one of the big disappointments of Covid-year. Call Me Miss Ross was scheduled to headline at Glastonbury and sold out an extended summer run at the O2. I immediately got tickets – for a London show, of course.

Now a sadder opportunity arises to pay tribute to The Supremes: the sudden death of founding member Mary Wilson aged 76, just days after she put out a YouTube video announcing a new solo album and the re-release of some old work.

Wilson and Ross were the yin and yang of the three-girl group which began in high school in Detroit as the Primettes; always with the burning intention of going professional. With what Wilson called her “aggressive charm” Ross shouldered her way out of the group in 1969 to solo superstardom. To Wilson’s great satisfaction, the reconstituted Supremes out-sold Ross the year after she went on her own.

Wilson was the linchpin of the group. She kept the flame of The Supremes alive until the day she died. She stayed with The Supremes from the seven years before their first US number one, Where Did Love Go in 1964, right through to the final break-up in 1977.

She fought lawsuits against Motown to protect the name and provided the definitive insider account in two best -selling memoirs, Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme and Supreme: Someday We’ll Be Together.

Florence Ballard, the third original Supreme, and the group’s first lead singer, was replaced in 1967 following drink and drug problems. She died of a heart attack aged 32 in 1976.

The magnificent Supremes looked as if they came from another planet when I, a small boy in suburban London, saw them on black and white TV in the mid 1960s. I was used to wobbly sets and tatty glitz of Top of The Pops, but these ladies pulsated polished glamour. Their big hair and gowns were immaculate and contemporary, unlike the dowdy ballgowns which white chanteuses seemed forced to wear. Their moves were in perfect synch – and the sound, interlacing lead and backing vocals, entrancing.

At the time, all male groups like The Beatles, Stones and The Kinks were scruffing themselves up, growing their hair and slouching around in their matching suits. The mop tops were “boys” and singers like Lulu, Sandi Shaw and Cilla Black were “girls”. Though actually no older, The Supremes may have been “Dreamgirls”, but they were already grown-up, elegantly sexy women.

Wilson bridled at the suggestion that they needed the compulsory etiquette training from the former model Maxine Powell to turn them into ladies. Be that as it may, by the time the Supremes met a real Princess in 1968 they had better manners than her. “Is that a wig you’re wearing?” was the opening gambit from the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret backstage at the Royal Variety performance.

The three women started young, hanging outside Berry Gordy’s Hitsville USA studios in Detroit until they were asked inside to provide backing claps. The seventeen-year-old schoolgirls stayed in Motown from then on.

The Supremes were the Beatles’ real rivals in the charts in the 1960s. In all they scored a dozen US Number Ones, including five in a row: You Can’t Hurry Love, Baby Love, Come See About Me, Stop in the Name of Love and Back in My Arms again.

Most of their hits were written by Motown’s in-house creative geniuses Brian Holland, Lamond Dozier and Eddie Holland. When it came to love songs, male groups could do little better than; I want to hold your hand, Let’s Spend the Night Together, and I love Jennifer Juniper and I know that she loves me. The Supremes sang with maturity of the complexities of relationships in the knowledge that love often hurts.

There were tensions within the group too. By 1967, the ever-ambitious Diana Ross was sleeping with the boss, and Berry Gordy rebranded the group as Diana Ross & The Supremes. Wilson described it as “a demotion”. According to The Daily Mail, Mary Wilson’s conquests included “Steve McQueen, Sir David Frost, film producer David (now Lord) Puttnam and Tom Jones”.

The Supremes’ material gradually took on a harder political edge. Contrast for example The Supremes’ Love Child with the shoddy, if beautiful, poverty tourism of Elvis Pressley’s In the Ghetto. In the 1970s the Supremes dabbled with a Black Power look and with new producers recorded further hits appropriate to the time such as the Vietnam ballad, Bill, When Are You Coming Home, Stoned Love and Floy Joy.

In one of its regular semi-suicidal searches for new audiences, the BBC is currently phasing out 60s and 70s music. The decades are being banished from the Radio Two playlist including Pick of the Pops with Paul Gambaccini. Tony Blackburn and Sounds of the Sixties have been exiled to an early morning once a week.

The BBC suits are under the impression that so-called “Mood Mums” want something fresher, such as ABBA or George Michael. But it’s unlikely there would have been the cross harmony, multi-singer ABBA, or The Spice Girls or Destiny’s Child without The Supremes.

The 1960s and 1970s were a unique and timeless era for popular music. The mid-century mass migration of African Americans from the agricultural South into big industrial cities including New York, Chicago, and Detroit/Motown, the heart of America’s motor car industry, carried black music, blues and soul into the mainstream. Mary Wilson was born in Mississippi, Diana Ross spent part of her childhood with relatives in Alabama. Motown and their Memphis-based rival Stax Records bottled and distilled the creative energy.

Berry Gordy wanted The Supremes to be for all “young Americans”. White people made up much of their fan base. Their influence went far beyond that. They are as much part of an immortal cannon as Mozart and Beethoven are in classical music.

In spite of Ross’s stellar solo career, Mary, Florence (posthumously) and Diana were inducted together as The Supremes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They will forever be the Queens of Motown.