I had been taking an interest in Motown, Stax & Northern Soul music for a few years by the time the iconic BBC Radio series, Hitsville USA: The Story Of Motown, presented by Stuart Grundy, started in January 1984.
I recorded the show every week, all but one on my trusty Grundig RR720, see image below and on this link, from Reverb, where you can try to buy such items.
The story of how this audio-beauty came into my possession is worthy of a piece in its own right. But in short, Ashley wanted to buy an Amstrad “all in one” thingie and offered me his Grundig RR720 for a ludicrously low price in order to raise the last few quid he needed to secure his purchase. I negotiated the price up for him as I couldn’t in all conscience buy the item for the price he quoted. I think the offer price was £12 and the strike price £20.
I continued to use and get pleasure from the RR720 for some 25 years, until its increasing hiss-noise and obsolete look condemned it around 2007 or 2008.
Anyway…
…my habit, most weeks, was to go into Newcastle shopping after listening to and taping this programme on a Saturday. I think it very unlikely that I got much if any work done before the lunchtime broadcast. I probably ate lunch (or some might argue brunch) while listening.
I note that Episode 5 was when Jilly was visiting at the end of an action-packed week:
I recall “making” Jilly listen to that episode, arranging our tour of Keele around the Motown programme time. Jilly became quite engaged with the subject after 30 minutes in the masterful hands of Stuart Grundy’s documentary and clips. I’m pretty sure that is where the idea of “The Lesson Tapes” that I made for Jilly started, as she confessed knowing next to nothing about that sort of music, classical music student that she was.
I recorded Week 10 at my parents house while decompressing and getting a little bit of work done there late March:
I remember discussing the series with Paul Deacon when I saw him that evening. Were you already working for the BBC Music Library at that time, Paul, or did that come later?
One or two of the cassettes that I made back then didn’t make it through the decades. I did scrape them all onto reel-to-reel at the time and those spools might still work…although they will be decaying (or already decayed) in storage. But none of that sort of thing matters any more, because a few clicks in the direction of the Internet Archive finds the very thing – all episodes neatly digitised and set out, Items 4 to 14 inclusive, through this link or the picture link below:
There are far worse things that you could do than listen to them all “in a podcast stylee”, as I think it is as good an audio documentary about Motown has yet to be made.
For me it brings back memories of when I should have been finishing my assignments and revising, but was still fiddling around with music and socialising and grub instead. A process I continued for many weeks after this series ended: