The Marvelettes were never as successful or as famous as the Supremes, their Motown Records stablemates, but to many of their fans they offered a truer, more authentic incarnation of the label’s famous sound in a run of hits that started with Please Mr Postman in 1961. Among the five girls who formed the group at school in Inkster, a suburb of Detroit, was Katherine Anderson, who has died aged 79.
So keen was the fledgling Motown company to unearth local talent that the top five groups in a talent contest at Inkster high school were invited to an audition. Although the teenaged quintet jokily calling themselves the Cansinyettes – “can’t sing yet” – had finished only fourth in the competition, it was they who won a recording contract.
A few months after signing up, they had been renamed the Marvelettes and Please Mr Postman was giving the label the first of its many No 1 hits. The 17-year-old Anderson, known to her friends as Kat, had been their lead singer in the talent contest, but another member, Gladys Horton, was thought to have a more commercial voice and took over the role.
Anderson remained a member throughout the 60s as others came and went; the group gradually reduced in numbers first to a quartet and then to a trio. She sang harmony and background parts on hits that included Playboy, Beechwood 4-5789 and Too Many Fish in the Sea and, after Wanda Young had taken over from Horton as the lead voice, on Don’t Mess With Bill, The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game and When You’re Young and in Love.
For all their success, and for all the stylish clothes they were given to wear on stage and in publicity photographs, they could never shake off a suspicion that their suburban origins held them back. In their minds, they were denied the promotional priority accorded to the Supremes, whose lead singer, Diana Ross, was a favourite of the label’s founder and president, Berry Gordy Jr, and who were lavishly groomed for appearances at sophisticated night clubs from New York to London.
The best of the Marvelettes’ records, however, expressed a collective endeavour that included not just the singers but the exceptional songwriters, producers and musicians kept on salary at Hitsville USA, as Motown’s Detroit studios became known. Such up-tempo records as I’ll Keep Holding On and Too Many Fish in the Sea became the perfect incarnation of the exuberant Motown Sound, capable of filling a dance floor well into a new century.
Born in Inkster, Anderson was the eldest of the four children of Florence (nee Smith) and Robert Anderson, respectively a nursing assistant and a construction worker. Her early ambition was to become a legal secretary and her role in the group would include attempting to keep an eye on their income from records and personal appearances, which included tours with the Motortown Revue alongside the Miracles, Mary Wells, the Temptations and Stevie Wonder. In 1965 they toured the UK, performing I’ll Keep Holding On on Ready Steady Go!, the weekly ITV programme popular with Britain’s Mods.
When Gordy decided to move his operations to Los Angeles in 1970, in pursuit of Hollywood success, the Marvelettes were among the singers and musicians left behind in Detroit, many of them embittered by what they saw as a desertion. Deciding to end her performing career, Anderson moved to Las Vegas with her husband, Joe Schaffner, a Detroit native who had served an apprenticeship as the young Aretha Franklin’s tour manager before working in similar capacities with many Motown acts, including Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Temptations and the Four Tops. In Las Vegas he became a lighting designer for shows by Elvis Presley, Liberace and others.
Eventually they moved back to Detroit, where the former Marvelette helped the city’s Mosaic Youth Theatre with Now That I Can Dance, a musical based on the story of Motown, while working as a counsellor with troubled teenagers both locally and on monthly visits to Toronto.
She also took up a legal battle, initiated by Horton, to regain control of the Marvelettes’ name from a promoter, Larry Marshak, who had purchased it from Motown. After Horton’s death in 2011, Anderson worked with her estate to bring the action to a successful conclusion.
The Marvelettes’ belief that they had been neglected by Motown was reinforced when the group was not invited to take part in the gala celebrations for the company’s 25th and 50th anniversaries. It took until 2004 for the sales of half a million copies of Please Mr Postman and Don’t Mess With Bill to be recognised by the award of gold discs to the surviving members of the group and, in a salute to their origins, to Inkster high school.
Anderson is survived by her daughters, Keisha and Kalaine. Schaffner died in 2021.
• Katherine Elaine Anderson Schaffner, singer and counsellor, born 16 January 1944; died 20 September 2023
