Wanda Young obituary

On the day five teenage girls from a Detroit suburb recorded a song called Please Mr Postman in August 1961, 18-year-old Wanda Young was the only one old enough to have graduated from high school. Only after the session was over were they given a name: the Marvelettes.

The man who named the group was Berry Gordy Jr, then in the process of establishing his Motown label and still short of hit records. So striking was the song, originally roughed out by one of the girls and completed by Motown’s cadre of young staff writers and arrangers, that it was released before the month was out.

Within weeks it had become a million-seller and the first of the fledgling label’s records to hit No 1 on the US pop charts.

The 16-year-old Gladys Horton had contributed the lead vocal to that initial hit, but it was Young, who has died aged 78, who would take over for many of their subsequent successes, starting with Don’t Mess With Bill, before the hits dried up towards the end of the 1960s and the group gradually disintegrated.

Young’s life was thereafter defined mostly by tragedy. Her marriage in 1963 to Bobby Rogers, a member of the Miracles, a fellow Motown group, fell apart after she had witnessed the murder of her sister. Her brother was injured in another shooting incident. She had suffered years of mental problems and addictions by the time the youngest of her children, a daughter, was shot and killed in 2015.

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She was born in Inkster, then a semi-rural black suburb built for workers in Detroit’s car factories. Her first ambition was to become a nurse. Of the five embryonic Marvelettes who gathered for their first recording session, Young had been the last to join, replacing Georgia Dobbins, who had come up with the initial idea for the hit song but left before the recording, citing parental disapproval. The group struggled to follow up that initial breakthrough and there would be two early departures, Juanita Cowart, who detested touring, and Georgeanna Tillman, who suffered health problems.

In 1964 they were offered the choice of two songs by Motown’s in-house writing teams. The one they rejected was the winsome Where Did Our Love Go?, which would start the Supremes’ climb to superstardom. The song the Marvelettes preferred, the more obviously danceable Too Many Fish in the Sea, gave them only a medium-sized hit.

Their fortunes revived in 1966 when Smokey Robinson, the lead singer and chief songwriter of the Miracles, took a particular liking to Young’s voice and wrote the slinky, finger-snapping Don’t Mess With Bill with her delivery in mind. A Top 10 hit, it was followed with almost equal success by The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game and My Baby Must Be a Magician, which would mark the Marvelettes’ final visit to the Top 20.

Perhaps Young’s finest performance came in 1967 on When You’re Young and in Love, a Van McCoy song originally recorded by Ruby and the Romantics. Given a sweepingly romantic arrangement to which Young’s ardent tones added a charming poignancy, the Marvelettes’ version failed to become a big hit but lodged itself firmly in the hearts of soul fans, particularly in the UK.

Not as receptive as the Supremes to attempts to polish their act for a wider audience, the group had drifted apart when Robinson offered to produce a solo album for Young in 1970. Lacking faith in the appeal of her name, the label decided to revive the collective identity and released it as The Return of the Marvelettes, despite no other members of the group having taken part in the recording. It was not a success.

Young already had an 18-month-old daughter, Meta, when she married Rogers in 1963. They had two children together, a son and a daughter, Robert and Bobbae. During one of her husband’s absences on tour, she went back to Inkster to visit her sister. The two women left the house to go shopping, her sister having put on a distinctive wig left at her house by a friend. While out, they were spotted from across the street by a spurned boyfriend of the wig’s owner. Mistaking the sister’s identity, he pulled a gun and shot her in the head. She died in Young’s arms.

Thereafter Young fell into despair, addiction and mental illness. Her marriage ended in 1975, with Rogers granted custody of their children. In 1982 she had a fourth child, a daughter called Miracle, who was brought up by an aunt and was murdered in a double shooting in Inkster in 2015.

In 1989 Young was among a group of former Motown acts invited by the British producer Ian Levine to take part in recordings for his new Motorcity label. In the words of one witness who had known her during the good times, she arrived at the studio in Detroit looking “a decrepit mess”.

Overnight she was groomed, coached and encouraged by Kim Weston – another Motown hitmaker – until she was capable of giving a performance alongside Horton, whose own post-Marvelettes life had included bringing up a disabled child. But while Horton was keen to revive her career and fought lengthy legal battles to be allowed to use the group’s name, which had fallen into the hands of an entrepreneur, Young quickly returned to obscurity.

Young is survived by Meta, Robert and Bobbae, seven grandchildren, a great-grandson, four sisters and four brothers.