Gladys Horton, 1945–2011

When 15-year-old Gladys Horton rounded up a handful of her high school friends to form a singing group in the Detroit suburb of Inkster, the five girls called themselves the Casinyets—a playful contraction of “can’t sing yet.” The girls entered a talent contest and lost, but one of their high school teachers thought they were good enough to recommend to a friend who had recently launched a record company in Detroit called Motown.

Under a new name—the Marvelettes—in the summer of 1961 the group released their debut single, “Please Mr. Postman,” with Horton singing lead (and a young Marvin Gaye on drums). The song “shot to No. 1, and the Marvelettes were put on the road,” said RollingStone.com. Traveling was so harsh for the black teenagers that one of the Marvelettes had a nervous breakdown. “Despite the difficulties, the group’s success helped transform Motown into a major record label and paved the way for the Ronettes, the Supremes, and all girl groups that followed.”

One of the Marvelettes helped write “Please Mr. Postman,” changing a friend’s bluesy foundation into pure pop. It was later recorded by the Beatles and again by the Carpenters in 1974, “and became one of only eight songs to top the Hot 100 by two different artists,” said HollywoodReporter.com. The Marvelettes in 1962 had a pair of Top 20 hits with “Playboy” and “Beechwood 4-5789” and had six Top 20 singles in all. But their early success was followed by “a three-year spell when their singles mostly peaked in the mid-third of the pop chart.”

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The Marvelettes predated the era when Motown honcho Berry Gordy packaged hits and put his acts through “charm school” to groom them into marketable stars, said the Los Angeles Times. “As unpolished as they were, they were the first queens at the label, a position that led to some conflicts with their rivals. In one incident, the Supremes’ Diana Ross punctuated a bout of bickering with Horton by driving a car in her direction and screeching to a stop with little room to spare.” But when Horton gave birth to a son with cerebral palsy in 1967, she stopped performing in order to care for him. “I’m an orphan, so I don’t have any family I could leave him with while I was carrying on with my singing career,” Horton recalled in a 1985 interview.

Another son, Vaughn Thornton, says that Horton was born in Gainesville, Fla., though “most biographical sources say she was born in Detroit or Inkster,” said The New York Times. Orphaned as an infant, she grew up in several Michigan towns. As one of her former bandmates, Katherine Schaffner, recalled, the group would never have formed without Horton’s impetus. “We only started singing together because Gladys asked us,” she said. “Usually we’d go to Georgeanna’s house and play canasta.”