Maurice King Archive Discovered...

[DWSheffer]

As the membership may have gathered from my participation in the lengthy thread on sharing your Motown collectibles at the start of the pandemic, I love seeking out and acquiring the memorabilia related to Motown as much I love the music of Motown. I'm always on the hunt for anything related to Motown's Detroit days up to 1972. To me there is nothing better than being able to hold things in your hand that really weren't meant to leave the facilities on West Grand Boulevard or Woodward Ave. I'm lucky in the fact that I live in Michigan and have contacts in the record collector business that regularly scour collections in the Detroit area, and keep me in mind when anything Motown shows up.

At any rate, my trip to Detroit on May 21st was two-fold. First, I attended the "What's Going On" 50th Anniversary event at Hitsville. It was a good time and I enjoyed being there with fellow aficionados celebrating the song's release. I met Dayna Hartwick and it was fun to listen to her talk of her experiences of working at Motown, starting at the age of 15! It was very nice being in a small group of 10 people in a slower than normal paced tour. I wish they were always like this to be honest!

The second, just as exciting reason was to meet a gentleman I had connected with early this year. It was months of back and forth and eager waiting on my part, but we finally set the time to meet that day. The man I was meeting buys unclaimed storage unit contents at auction in the Detroit area. A couple of years ago he purchased a unit and concluded the contents belonged to one of Maurice King's sons. Included was the equivalent of a file cabinet's worth of papers and handwritten musical scores belonging to Maurice. OH, and a box of approximately 40 reel to reel audio tapes too! There is a lot of material from the years when Maurice was the musical director for the Spinners, but I am happy with the amount of Motown material I was able to discover as well. There is also a fair amount of items from the 1950's and before when Maurice led his band the Wolverines.

If there is interest, I will share some of the discoveries with the forum, and there are some really neat items! I was able to secure a reel to reel player on Monday and have reviewed the audio tapes. Wow is all I can say! I made a post yesterday asking about Chris Clark's appearances at the Roostertail. Well, I can tell you a different performance by Chris has been discovered and is likely from the Roostertail as Scott Regan is the announcer. It's approximately 13 minutes long and the quality is great. Other reels include The Temptations, Tammi Terrell, Martha and The Vandellas, Brenda Holloway, Smokey and The Miracles and more Chris Clark.

Luckily this archive was not lost to the dumpster as it very easily could have been. Most storage unit buyers would have seen a pile of old papers and a pile of spaghetti reel to reel audio tapes and threw them out, almost without a doubt.
Darin