Barrett Strong, songwriter who penned the lyrics of Motown classics such as War and I Heard it Through the Grapevine – obituary

Barrett Strong, who has died aged 81, was the first male artist to record a hit for the Detroit-based Motown Records, his gruff voice being heard on the 1959 number Money (That’s What I Want); he was, however, a reluctant vocalist and would team up with the producer Norman Whitfield to write some of the label’s best-known soul songs, many of them performed by the Temptations.

Money, with its immortal line “Your love don’t pay my bills,” began life one July afternoon when Strong was working on a song at the offices of Tamla Records, as Motown was originally known. He heard Berry Gordy, the label’s founder, playing the piano in the studio and talking with the receptionist Janie Bradford, and joined them.

Sitting down next to Gordy at the keyboard, he began to play a repetitive motif. “I was playing that piano lick and Mr Gordy said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know’.” He started singing the lyrics that Gordy and Janie Bradford had been working on. The result was Money, a number that gave the fledgling label both credibility and a vital infusion of cash.

Impressed by Strong’s improvised singing, Gordy chose him to record the vocal line. Money reached No 22 in the US charts and has since been covered by countless bands including the Beatles and the Flying Lizards.

Strong later said he never saw any money for his contribution to Money. At first he showed scant interest, dismissing the song as “just a spin-off from What’d I Say, that Ray Charles thing”.

But unbeknown to him, in 1962 Jobete Publishing, Motown’s publishing entity, had written to the US Copyright Office saying that there had been a mistake and that his name should be removed from the copyright registration. It was restored in 1987 but taken off again the following year, although he knew nothing of this until 2012, by which time it was too late to recoup any lost earnings.

There were no such problems with his other Motown songs, including Wherever I Lay My Hat (1962), which was later covered by Paul Young; I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1967), a hit for both Marvin Gaye and for Gladys Knight and the Pips; and Papa was a Rollin’ Stone (the Temptations, 1972), for which he received a Grammy Award. He and Whitfield were closely associated with the Temptations, starting with I Wish it Would Rain (1967) and Cloud Nine (1968), which created a new, psychedelic kind of soul.

Yet the Strong-Whitfield song that had the greatest impact was War, a scathing commentary on America’s military adventures in Vietnam that is known for its widely quoted refrain: “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” He had a paratrooper cousin who was badly injured in Vietnam and a singer friend who was crippled for life after being hit by shrapnel. “You talk about these things … and it inspires you to say something about it,” he said.

War was originally heard on the Temptations’ album Psychedelic Shack (1970), but Gordy decided not to release the single, for fear of alienating the band’s more conservative fanbase. Instead, it was released by another Motown artist, Edwin Starr, whose harsher version invoked exactly the sound that Strong was looking for and became the first fully anti-war single dealing specifically with Vietnam to reach No 1 in the Billboard charts. “When Bruce Springsteen did War, it was real exciting to me, ’cause he felt what I felt,” Strong concluded.

Barrett Strong was born in West Point, Mississippi, on February 5 1941. When he was five his family moved to Detroit, where his father worked at the Uniroyal plant. As a teenager he taught himself to play the piano, often accompanying his older sisters in their gospel group, the Strong Sisters, in the city’s churches.

“My sisters were very pretty girls, so when all the singers would come to town, all the guys would stop by my house. I’d play the piano and we’d have a jam session,” he said. The singer Jackie Wilson was among their number and soon introduced him to Gordy.

Strong was still a pupil at Central High School, Detroit, when he entered a tiny basement studio to record his first single, Let’s Rock (1959), though few copies were pressed and it was little heard beyond Detroit. Before long he was working at a shoe store at 12th Street and Clairmont, the centre of the 1967 riot, and trying to get noticed in music.

He recalled small gigs around town at venues such as the Dairy Workers Hall with a drummer friend, emulating Ray Charles. “Smokey Robinson, all of us, all doing amateur contests at theatres around town,” he said. “Everybody tryin’ to win $25.” Yet he “wasn’t crazy” about appearing on stage. “It’s too demanding. You owe yourself to the public,” he told Richard Bak in the book Detroitland (2011). “I preferred to be behind the scenes.”

After Money he worked with Gordy and Robinson on Yes, No, Maybe So and cut the first version of Gordy and Robinson’s Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right. In need of steady employment, however, he left Motown to work on a Chrysler production line in Detroit, before returning to the label in the mid-1960s. His career there ended for a second time in 1971, when Gordy moved Motown to California and Strong remained in Detroit. “I love my hometown,” he explained. “It’s funky here. It’s not so funky there.”

That move provided an opportunity to resurrect his solo career, including releasing the singles Stand Up and Cheer For the Preacher (1973) on the Epic label and Is it True (1975) for Capitol, as well as the albums Stronghold (1975) and Live & Love (1976).

He also worked with the city’s young musicians, treating them as his extended family. “Some of the guys I’m working with are into the older singers and they look at me as someone who can teach them something,” he said. “And I look at them as having something new they can teach me.”

Strong sold the rights to many of his songs, and in 1995 created Blarritt Records. “I love music, the creative process,” he said. “I dreamt of building a studio and making it work. But you can’t sit at home and dream about it – you’ve got to get in the trenches.” He did not, however, have a strong head for business and the studio failed.

In the early 2000s he returned to singing, releasing his first album for 25 years, Stronghold II (2001), a return to the lush Motown soul that he had helped to create in the 1960s, with eight original tracks and a cover of I Wish it Would Rain, one of his Temptations songs. But he was no longer doing it for personal glory. “Been there, done that,” he explained. “I’m not into that thing anymore, jumping up and down onstage shaking my booty.”

Strong, who had a stroke in 2008, rarely talked about the past and hardly ever agreed to interviews. “Talk about what I’m doing now,” he said in 2011. “Yesterday’s gone.” Modest to a fault, he told how during Motown’s 1960s heyday he and Whitfield “wrote maybe 300 songs and we had 12 good ones”, adding: “So 288 were bad ones.” Historians of the genre might beg to differ.

Barrett Strong had at least six children.

Barrett Strong, born February 5 1941, died January 29 2023