The label’s first pop number one (and their second R&B number one, after the Miracles’ Shop Around almost a year previously), this was a watershed the nation’s top record, the best-selling record across America, in jukeboxes and on radios all over the nation, was by five African-American schoolgirls on a black-owned independent label. The hole it smashed in the charts left the path clearer for dozens of future Motown artists to follow. The result is easily Motown’s best single to date, a song with a killer tune, a sound like nothing else out there, and an instant and universal lyrical hook which listeners latched on to in their millions. The Marvelettes’ début single was this sensational pop song, originally brought to the table by former member Georgia Dobbins (who was forced out of the group before they ever signed to Motown, because her father felt touring with a singing group was incompatible with her religious duties) and her pianist friend William Garrett, and then reworked and rewritten by two of the most respected Hitsville staff writers of the time, Brian Holland and Satintone Robert Bateman, as well as Freddie Gorman who was brought in to help with the song because he actually was a postman. Their lead singer Gladys Horton was fifteen years old. Untutored and raw, their stage act would be developed and refined by Motown’s Artist Development handlers until they set the template for every Motown girl group of the Sixties. The top three entries won Motown auditions, but the soon-to-be Marvelettes intrigued their school’s music teacher enough for the group to be finagled onto the trip, where they won the Motown brass over with their enthusiasm and attitude. Motown’s first great girl group came to Hitsville after finishing fourth in a high school talent contest. This, more than any other record the company had previously released, announced that Motown was a major creative and commercial force to be reckoned with, and it all started with five callow schoolgirls from Inkster, Michigan. Motown’s one hundredth single side (by my counting system, anyway) was also their first number one pop hit, as well as one of the great enduring monuments of Sixties pop music.
#PLEASE MR POSTMAN LICENSE#
(Released in the UK under license through Fontana Records) (Written by Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, Brian Holland, Robert Bateman and Freddie Gorman) Fontana H 355 (A), November 1961 b/w So Long Baby
Tamla T 54046 (A), August 1961 b/w So Long Baby
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