‘Mother Motown’ Raynoma Gordy Singleton passes at 79

The world lost one of the primary architects of the signature “Motown Sound” with the passing of Raynoma Gordy Singleton on November 11, 2016 from brain cancer. She was 79.

At a memorial service in her honor earlier this month, names made legendary in their own right thanks to affiliation with the seminal record label sang her praises.

“It was Ray who actually was the one who just governed that whole Motown Music sound,” Mary Wilson of The Supremes told family, friends and loved ones who gathered to celebrate Singleton’s life. “[She was] the beginning of it and [the one] who helped to mold it into the sound that the whole world later got to know as Motown.”

With her former husband Berry Gordy, Singleton helped create a sound that catapulted R&B into the mainstream and forever changed the landscape of popular music – in America and around the globe. And she was there from the beginning.

Born to make music 

Raynoma Gordy Singleton was born Raynoma Mayberry in Detroit on March 8, 1937 to Ashby and Lucille Mayberry. They recognized their daughter’s musical gifts and bought her a piano when she was six-years-old. Shortly after beginning piano lessons, Ray (as she would come to be known early in life) was playing for the church and social functions. Her father, a respected janitor for Cadillac Motors, encouraged her musical aspirations. Her mother taught her to be enterprising and steadfast. Ray sought formal training in music at Cass Technical High School – where she learned to play 11 instruments.

The cadences of Detroit life in the late fifties and R&B music, Jazz and European-classical, influenced and shaped Ray. At home and at school, she was inspired to craft songs and developed her talent for arranging music. In 1955, she married Charles Liles, a musician, and gave life to her first child, Cliff Warren Liles. The pair divorced after two years of marriage.

She met Berry Gordy in the late 1950s. She began writing music and collaborating with him and his colleagues. They formed the RAYBER music writing company, followed by Tamla Records –which was Berry Gordy’s first label. 

“There was no Motown. Matter of fact, Motown hadn’t even been thought of then, and Ray had this idea of getting producers and writers to get her and Berry to do their songs,” said Eddie Holland of the early Motown songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland. “And they were paying Ray and Berry to do their songs. That was the start of everything.”

Ray’s keen intuition helped her secure talents like Little Stevie Wonder for Tamla, and her formal training helped her nurture it. Such was also the case with Smokey Robinson, to whom she taught chord structures.

Birth of a musical empire 

Raynoma took a young Berry Gordy into her home in 1958. A romance developed within the first year of them living and working together. They married in 1959.

Gordy tasked Ray with handling the company’s music publishing division as well as overseeing sales and creative departments. “Miss Ray,” as she became known, built a music empire with Berry Gordy and their families and friends. She found the building which housed Hitsville, U.S.A., the recording studio – a precursor to Motown Records – which was also she and Berry’s third home together.

They were blessed with a child, Kerry Ashby Gordy, but the couple divorced in 1963. She relocated to New York, where she continued to manage the publishing company, Jobete Music, which she had co-founded with Berry. 

There she hired a young George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic as a writer. Soon she met songwriter and producer Eddie Singleton and they moved to Washington, D.C., got married and had two children. In Washington, D.C, Ray and her husband Eddie, who managed the early careers of Tony Orlando and Flip Wilson in New York, started Shrine Records. 

“Miss Ray” would return to Motown as an executive in 1967 and again in the late seventies when she managed her sons, Kerry and Cliff, and produced their band, Apollo. Benny Medina, the lead singer, who worked for Motown, later became renowned as a manager with a roster of stars such as Will Smith and Jennifer Lopez.

In the 1980s, during her last stint at Motown as executive producer and vice president, Miss Ray released hits by Smokey Robinson (“Being with You”), DeBarge (“All This Love”) and Rockwell (“Somebody’s Watching Me”).

“Raynoma’s contribution to Motown should be No. 1 in history books,” said Claudette Robinson of Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. “She should have been titled president of Motown as well, because she did such an outstanding job.”

At her memorial service on December 4, Ray’s eldest son Cliff Liles shared a story that provided a colorful illustration of Ray, her artistic prowess and bravado. Back when he was a teenager, trying to emulate the funk sound of his Motown heroes on bass guitar, his mother burst into his room.

“Boy, what are you doing? Give me that guitar,” Ray said. “Now this is how it’s done!” She took the guitar, assumed the swagger and stance of a bass player, and pounded it out herself.

That was “Miss Ray,” mother, boss, star maker, “Mother Motown,” musical genius and hero.

Ms. Singleton is survived by her sons, Cliff Liles, Kerry Gordy and Eddie Singleton Jr.; her daughter, Rya Singletary; four grandchildren; and a sister, Juanita Dickerson.