Throughout the 1960s, musicians and record producers puzzled over the precise formula used to create the Motown sound. Was it some special property of the microphones, or the way the snare drum was tuned, or even the kind of carpeting used in the company’s Detroit studio? One vital factor was overlooked, because its presence was almost subliminal: the rhythm guitar playing of Joe Messina, who has died aged 93.
A jazz-trained musician, Messina often did little more on a Motown record than play a chord on every backbeat, the second and fourth beats of each bar. But those downstrokes added a certain thickness and tone to beats already being given their weight by the snare drum and their cutting edge by a tambourine. The result was the kind of dancefloor propulsion heard on Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street, the Miracles’ Going to a Go-Go, the Four Tops’ I Can’t Help Myself and Temptations’ (I Know) I’m Losing You, the sort of hits that would give Motown a vast international following.
