Barrett Strong, Motown hitmaker and co-writer of I Heard It Through The Grapevine, dead at 81

Barrett Strong, one of Motown’s founding artists and most gifted songwriters who sang lead on the company’s breakthrough single Money (That’s What I Want), later collaborating with producer Norman Whitfield on such classics as I Heard It Through the Grapevine, War and Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone, has died. He was 81.

His death was announced Sunday on social media by the Motown Museum, which did not immediately provide further details.

“Barrett was not only a great singer and piano player, but he, along with his writing partner Norman Whitfield, created an incredible body of work,” Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a statement.

Strong had yet to turn 20 when he agreed to let his friend Gordy, in the early days of building a recording empire in Detroit, manage him and release his music. Within a year, he was a part of history as the piano player and vocalist for Money, Motown’s first major hit from 1960 and a popular standard soon covered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many others.

Strong never again approached the success of Money on his own, and decades later fought for acknowledgement that he helped write it. But, with Whitfield, he formed a productive and eclectic songwriting team.

The Whitfield-Strong team turned out hard-hitting and topical works, along with such timeless ballads as I Wish It Would Rain and Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me). With I Heard it Through the Grapevine, they provided an up-tempo, call-and-response hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips and a dark, hypnotic ballad for Marvin Gaye, his 1968 version one of Motown’s all-time sellers.

Songs widely covered

Barrett-Whitfield helped lead the way as several Motown artists moved beyond just love songs in the late 1960s with politically conscious material. They turned out Cloud Nine and Psychedelic Shack for the Temptations and for Edwin Starr the protest anthem War and its widely quoted refrain, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely … nothing!”

“With War, I had a cousin who was a paratrooper that got hurt pretty bad in Vietnam,” Strong told LA Weekly in 1999. “I also knew a guy who used to sing with [Motown songwriter] Lamont Dozier that got hit by shrapnel and was crippled for life. You talk about these things with your families when you’re sitting at home, and it inspires you to say something about it.”

Whitfield-Strong’s other hits, mostly for the Temptations, included I Can’t Get Next to You, That’s the Way Love Is and the Grammy-winning chart-topper Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone. Artists covering their songs ranged from Detroit native Aretha Franklin (I Wish It Would Rain), Bruce Springsteen (War), Al Green (I Can’t Get Next to You) and Paul Young (Wherever I Lay My Hat).

Strong was also among the Motown names cited in Billy Bragg’s Levi Stubbs’ Tears: “Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong/Are here to make right everything that’s wrong.”

Strong was born in West Point, Miss., and moved to Detroit a few years later. He was a self-taught musician who learned piano without needing lessons and, with his sisters, formed a local gospel group, the Strong Singers.

In his teens, he got to know such artists as Franklin, Smokey Robinson and Gordy, who was impressed with his writing and piano playing. Money, with its opening shout, “The best things in life are free/But you can give them to the birds and bees,” would, ironically, lead to a fight — over money.

‘Songs outlive people’

Strong was initially listed among the writers and he often spoke of coming up with the pounding piano riff while jamming on Ray Charles’s What’d I Say in the studio.

But only decades later would he learn that Motown had since removed his name from the credits, costing him royalties. Strong’s legal argument was weakened because he had taken so long to ask for his name to be reinstated.

“Songs outlive people,” Strong told The New York Times in 2013. “The real reason Motown worked was the publishing. The records were just a vehicle to get the songs out there to the public. The real money is in the publishing, and if you have publishing, then hang on to it. That’s what it’s all about. If you give it away, you’re giving away your life, your legacy. Once you’re gone, those songs will still be playing.”

Strong spent part of the 1960s recording for other labels, left Motown again in the early 1970s and made a handful of solo albums. In 2004, he was voted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, which cited him as “a pivotal figure in Motown’s formative years.”

Whitfield died in 2008.

The music of Strong, Whitfield and other Motown writers was later featured in the Broadway hit Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations.