American music changed forever inside this modest house, where Berry Gordy hung the Hitsville sign. In 1959 Berry Gordy bought this two-story home on West Grand Boulevard, hung a sign reading Hitsville U.S.A. across the front, and turned the place into Motown Records. In the small Studio A in back, open day and night, a remarkable run of hits was recorded through the 1960s: the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5.
Gordy ran it like an assembly line of his own, drawing on the auto-factory city around him, with the songwriting, recording, choreography, and grooming all under one roof. The Motown sound crossed racial lines on the radio at the height of the civil rights movement, music made by Black artists in Detroit that the whole nation sang along to. The studio is preserved almost exactly as it was.
Look at the white house with its blue sign, and imagine the singers crowded around a single microphone in the room out back.