Diana Ross, a skinny twenty-year-old from the Detroit ghetto who had been performing for four years with a typical high-school vocal group, came to embody from 1964 onward the image of Motowns ye-ye girl.
The Supremes were carefully engineered by Gordy himself to be the crossover group that would churn out hits by the bucketful. The cross-class success came as expected, and in the six years of their partnership the three black Beatles in skirts racked up a series (unprecedented for black music) of twelve number-one hits, personally crafted by the H-D-H trio, including Where Did Our Love Go and Baby Love in 1964; Stop In The Name Of Love and I Hear A Symphony in 1965; My World Is Empty Without You and You Can't Hurry Love in 1966; and finally The Happening in 1967; stellar songs that have rightfully entered the canon of Americas most familiar melodies.
On all their records Diana Ross seems to sing (with her candid tone, somewhat cool and ecstatic, never truly emotional) a refrain that never ends. Her voice keeps floating melodically over the motif that repeats endlessly (typical of I Hear A Symphony), while her two companions fill the atmosphere with adolescent counterpoints.
As times changed, Gordy separated Ross from her companions and within a few months remade her reputation: from carefree teenager to mature, sophisticated queen of song, heir to Billie Holiday.
On her own, Diana Ross (married to label boss Gordy) indulged in
vocal tours de force for
Ashford's and Simpson's Ain't No Mountain High Enough (1970),
Gerry Goffin's Do You Know Where Are You Going To (1975),
and Pam Sawyer's and Marilyn McLeod's erotic disco monolith Love Hangover (1976).
Diana Ross kept churning out one hit a year, even allowing herself in 1981 to set up her own company, abandoning Motown, husband, and soul music. Her new hits, lavishly arranged with full orchestra, included the classic Ain't No Mountain High Enough (1970, by Ashford/Simpson), her vocal tour de force; the plaintive Do You Know Where Are You Going To (1975), her most tender and melodramatic refrain (written by Gerry Goffin); the seven sensual minutes of Love Hangover (1976, by Pam SawyerMarilyn McLeod), one of the records that created disco music; and the dance novelty Upside Down (1980). These testify to her unchanged fidelity to the sentimental high-school cliché and, added to the previous ones, earned her the absolute record of number-one hits in America (eighteen). In 1983 Central Park in New York filled beyond measure (more than half a million people) for one of her free concerts.
