Norman Whitfield

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Norman Whitfield was an American songwriter and producer at Motown. He was born in Harlem, New York, in 1940, and moved to Detroit with his family as a teenager. At nineteen he kept knocking at Hitsville USA, the Motown office, until Berry Gordy took him on in the quality control department, which decided which songs would be released. Before long he was co-writing himself, including Marvin Gaye's Pride and Joy and Too Many Fish in the Sea by The Marvelettes.

Music and breakthrough

Together with lyricist Barrett Strong, Whitfield wrote I Heard It Through the Grapevine, first a hit for Gladys Knight & the Pips and later for Marvin Gaye. In 1966 he took over from Smokey Robinson as regular producer of The Temptations. After singer David Ruffin left in 1968, he steered the group towards a darker sound, with funk and lyrics about social problems. That psychedelic soul can be heard in Cloud Nine, Ball of Confusion and Papa Was a Rollin' Stone, which earned several Grammys. For Edwin Starr he produced the protest song War.

Influence

In 1975 Whitfield started his own label, Whitfield Records. The greatest success was Rose Royce's Car Wash (1976), the title song of the film of the same name; for the soundtrack he received a Grammy. He co-wrote 92 hits in America and 61 in England. Whitfield died in 2008, of complications from diabetes, and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024. His career shows that Motown was not only an assembly line of hits, but also a place where a producer could renew the sound.

Listening

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