Carolyn Crawford Is the Best Motown Singer You’ve Never Heard Of
Article from RollingStone.com:
On a bright Saturday morning in the summer of 1963, 13-year-old Carolyn Crawford walked onto the stage of Detroit’s Fox Theatre and sat behind a piano. She had to bring her A game to this performance, the finals of the Tip-Top Talent Contest, hosted by a local gospel and R&B station. Crawford had collected untold numbers of Tip-Top bread wrappers to get there, and now it was her turn to compete for the grand prize: a four-year contract with Motown Records.
She began to sing “Laughing Boy” by her idol, Mary Wells, adding an extra verse for good measure. Her ingenuity, combined with honeyed vocals that stung with the emotional depth of someone at least twice her age, secured Crawford’s first-place finish.
Shortly after the contest, Crawford and her mother took a meeting with Motown founder Berry Gordy. “He asked if I had any questions for him, and I had three,” says the now-74-year-old woman from her Detroit home. “The first was, ‘Can I write my own songs?’ And he said, ‘Can you write?’ And I said, ‘I believe I can.’” Her second request was to keep her given name. And the third was that she wanted to be on the Motown label, “the one with the big blue M — I didn’t want to be on VIP, Gordy, Soul, or any of those other ones,” she says.
Considering how many of today’s artists struggle to maintain creative control over their work, from Tinashe’s label woes in the 2010s to Taylor Swift’s battle over the rights to her masters, it’s hard not to marvel at the moxie of a 13-year-old girl demanding a powerful music executive bend to her will — let alone the fact that she did so a full six decades ago. But within minutes of meeting Crawford, whom friends call “a firecracker,” it’s clear she’s always been fearless. She’s the kind of woman who, in her mid-twenties, would show up unannounced at the Philadelphia International offices and ask for a meeting with the songwriting and production duo Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. “They weren’t there, but I left my name and number,” Crawford says. “About a week later Leon Huff called me and said he was interested. He gave me an airplane ticket to come out and record.”
She’s also the kind of woman who would dash off a handwritten note with her CV and contact info for a music journalist visiting her current place of work, a fantastic used record store in Detroit specializing in rare soul 45s. This is, incidentally, how we met last year, and why I’ve been tumbling down her rabbit hole of a résumé ever since, from Motown to Philadelphia International to work with the groups Chapter 8 and Hodges, James, Smith, and Crawford to her collaborations with drummer Hamilton Bohannon on classic disco hits like “Let’s Start the Dance,” not to mention the two solo albums she released on Mercury Records in the late ’70s. To this day, Crawford performs club gigs, and she even has a new-old record coming out this month — a seven-inch of two unreleased songs she recorded with former Motown songwriter and producer William “Mickey” Stevenson in 1972, due Feb. 23 on the British reissue label Ace/Kent.
But back to that initial meeting with Gordy: “Whether I was a megastar or not or ever will be, he gave me those three wishes, and I’m well satisfied with that,” Crawford says. “I did my very first recording ever at Motown at midnight on my 14th birthday.” Produced by Holland & Dozier and written by Crawford, “Forget About Me” appeared on the 51st entry in Motown’s single series. Sadly, the track, which is as buoyant and bittersweet as some of the label’s biggest hits, has been, for the most part, forgotten.
Crawford’s second Motown single, “My Smile Is Just a Frown [Turned Upside Down],” performed better, hitting No. 39 on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues charts. Janie Bradford, Motown’s receptionist-turned-songwriter, calls the track a “favorite” in Susan Whitall’s 2017 oral history, Women of Motown [Second Edition]. “I thought that was pretty unique,” Bradford said of the song, which she co-wrote with Smokey Robinson and Stevenson. “It kind of hit and missed the charts, it never really peaked. But from that song we got a cult following for the last 30 or 35 years. Everybody overseas knows about that song and Carolyn Crawford, but it did nothing here.”
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