Motown Spotlight: May 2025 - Florence Ballard

There are several things I regret in my life so far, and two things in particular are high on my list: not being able to meet Florence Ballard and Tammi Terrell. I didn’t even get to chat to them, which is a double whammy. Let’s be honest here, because with Diana Ross at the helm, it was highly unlikely that Florence would have been afforded the pleasure of talking to the media. Let alone me.

With Tammi, the situation was slightly different. She was her own person. Yet despite running the Motown fan club in London, and the passion we had for Tammi and Motown, our requests to Motown/USA, were passed over – we even offered to pay for the phone call – which in the late sixties would probably have cost a week’s salary!

Over the years though I’ve been fortunate enough to talk about both ladies with other people and, of course, read about them but nothing on this earth beats a personal conversation. Now it’s too late of course. I think the nearest I came to writing about Florence in any detail was her obituary for Blues & Soul in 1976.

In hindsight, I’ve written far too many obituaries over the years – and none get any easier. In 1979, three years later, B&S editor Bob Killbourn phoned me with the sad news about Minnie Riperton’s passing and asked me to quickly write the lady’s obituary because the magazine was geared up to go to print, and he felt a female touch was needed. Y’see Minnie had died from breast cancer; she was thirty-one years old. I was hesitant at first, but with Capitol Records’ UK publicist, Debbie Bennett’s help, I was able to give what I hope was a sincere tribute.

Anyway, that was then. Back to the Florence obituary. By today’s standards – where we have access to mountains of information via the internet – all I had to refer to was a phone call from Motown’s UK office, which divulged not much, merely confirming the ex-Supreme had died following a cardiac arrest.

For what it’s worth, here’s an extract of my printed word. “I’m not going to talk about the successes of The Supremes but hopefully write a few words about the tragic death of Florence Ballard on Sunday, 22 February in Detroit’s Mount Carmen Hospital. Florence always appeared to me to be the girl people walked over, even from the word go with the group. Not only did she sing lead on early recordings but founded the original line-up, yet it became apparent she was going to be pushed aside. The first step soon arrived with Diana Ross taking over lead. There were many reasons for this. Flo hadn’t got a distinctive voice (I soon changed my mind about that statement), no prominent stage personality (she wasn’t allowed to express her true talent), and wasn’t the most attractive in the group (whatever made me write that). She was an ordinary down-to-earth lady, who was a third of one of the world’s greatest ever groups. Diana had all the qualities Florence lacked, and there’s no disputing Diana carried the group on most of their significant successes through to 1967, the year when Cindy Birdsong replaced Flo.”

The Supreme, who had sung on sixteen top forty US singles, including ten number ones, was fired from the trio.

I further wrote. “The public were always interested in Florence, with or without The Supremes, but it was almost impossible in those days for an ex-Motown artist to succeed elsewhere. Whether it was the record company that lacked the confidence in an ex, or the artist herself, I don’t know. Florence probably found it extremely difficult to go it alone, after being part of a group for so long. OK, Martha Reeves did it. But don’t forget that was quite a few years later, and Martha was the leader of her group.”

Let’s step back in time to the early sixties and bring in The Marvelettes, courtesy of Marc Taylor’s book The Original Marvelettes. Although not generally publicly known at the time (Shh – another of Motown’s secrets!) Florence was a temporary member of the group. When The Marvelettes were recording “Please Mr Postman”, Gladys Horton was nervous about singing lead. It chanced that Florence and Mary Wilson were in the studio, so taught her some tricks of the trade, while Flo helped her create the adlibs. When Marvelette Wanda Rogers was pregnant, it was Florence they turned to. At the time she was dating Joe Schaffner, the group’s road manager, and was voted in to join them for a pending US tour.

As promoters expected five Marvelettes on stage,and with The Supremes doing nothing much at the time, Ms. Ballard was the perfect choice. “Florence had a helluva voice and she had very good range,” Marvelette Katherine Anderson told Marc Taylor. “With Wanda pretty much singing soprano, Florence more-or-less easily fitted into the group because not too many people had seen Wanda……Wanda was barely a good five feet (so) Florence had the height to fit in. With myself being about five foot seven inches, she would be approximately the same height as myself which helped balance our appearance.”

Despite being the perfect replacement, there was a problem – Florence wasn’t a gifted dancer. Katherine admitted, “She found the choreography rather hard because we were a group with a lot of movement. She fell into the category of middle-of-the-road because she wasn’t a dancer per se.”

While on tour, Florence shared a room with Gladys, they became pretty close, having discovered a common ground in traumatic childhood and adolescent experiences. Such was their closeness that Florence sadly confided that she was raped as a teenager, which nobody knew about outside of her fellow Supremes. “Florence was really quiet….We were discussing bad times and that’s when she told me.” Florence’s tenure as a Marvelette lasted just this one tour.

Much has been written about Ms. Ballard over the years; some things were totally untrue, while others, including Peter Benjaminson’s book The Lost Supreme, were accurate as it reflected Flo’s own words. What follows is really a snap shot of her professional life in the words of others. But first off, let’s set the scene.

Florence Glenda Ballard, born 30 June 1943 in Detroit, to Lurlee and Jesse, was one of thirteen children. As she had light skin and auburn hair, she was soon nicknamed “Blondie”. Florence went on to become the founding member of The Supremes, the most successful female vocal group in our history. She was a global singing star and a wealthy woman at the age of twenty-one. Marvin Gaye remembered her as “the spunky, funny one. Something of a comedienne onstage, a beautiful person, loving and warm. She loved to laugh and everyone loved her.”

In his autobiography To Be Loved, Berry Gordy wrote that Flo was a unique character whose wit, sarcasm and deadpan comments kept everyone laughing: “At times she was outgoing, fun-loving and even challenging. At other times, withdrawn and depressed. In a sense, she controlled us all. When she was happy, we all were. When she wasn’t it could be a nightmare. Flo was caught in the middle. The harder Diana and Mary worked at trying to outdo each other, it seemed the less motivated she became.”

Gradually, the public learned that Diana’s opinion of Florence was particularly low, and certainly comments like “she was always on a negative trip” and “she wanted to be a victim. She was just one of those people you want to grab and shake and yell ‘get your f…..g life together” didn’t help. However, it wasn’t always handbags at dawn.

Here’s an example: when Diana collapsed on stage during a concert in Boston. and was rushed to hospital, Florence visited her. And it was during their intimate time together in that hospital room that Diana told her she should take more leads. Flo disagreed with her, knowing Berry Gordy would never allow it. Undeterred Diana pushed on saying, “We are The Supremes. We can do anything.”

Then together, they sat on her bed and sang along to a tape of “Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone” (the trio’s next single) which Berry had dropped off for Diana to learn. Even in sickness, she couldn’t escape! And another thought, I wonder how close Flo came to replacing Diana, a move Mary Wilson said she would support.

The Supremes’ touring schedules were manic, and alongside the fun and closeness shared by the three women, who were enjoying the American dream of rags to riches, a cold war gradually developed as personalities and attitudes clashed. Due to his work load in the studio, Berry didn’t regularly travel with them, so relied on road managers and chaperones to keep him up to speed.

Before long, they reported on backstage bickering which, Berry wrote, led to another problem becoming apparent: “Flo’s drinking. She was showing up late for shows and interviews, skipping rehearsals, putting on too much weight. Diana and Mary confirmed this and told me how hard it had been on them. Their keeping it from me had actually brought them closer together. Everybody knew how I felt about drinking and drugs. They had heard me say many times – ‘It’s easier to stay out than to get out.’

It seemed the harsher the warning, the more flagrant Flo’s behaviour became. It finally got to the point where we had to bring in Cindy Birdsong, formally of Patti LaBelle & The Blue Belles, to be on standby and go on when Flo didn’t show up.”

If I’m correct it seems this whole situation of Flo leaving came to a head when The Supremes were performing at The Flamingo, Las Vegas, in July 1967. The Supreme told Peter Benjaminson that she had had a few drinks; probably too many to have a clear head “and they kept calling me fat so much until I went on stage and I poked my stomach out as far as I could. Gordy called me up next morning and he said ‘You’re fired.’ I said ‘I’m not.'”

He then told her that she wasn’t to step a foot on the stage that night. If she disobeyed him, he would have her thrown off. Undeterred, Florence told him she would indeed perform that night. Enter, Berry’s sister Gwen, who calmly told her that her brother couldn’t actually make her leave The Supremes because they were contractually tied to each other and Motown.

The arguing went on and on, until Flo admitted she had had enough. “What the hell. I’ll be as miserable as hell out here (Las Vegas) as long as he’s around, so I might as well just leave. So I left. They had Cindy already there….(so) I flew back to Detroit.” Her dismissal from the group coincided with the group’s re-branding to Diana Ross & The Supremes, thus separating Diana from her back-up vocalists, and indicated the first step in Berry Gordy’s plans to promoting Diana as a solo artist and actress.

“It was so disheartening to see how Motown had turned its back on her,” Martha Reeves noted in her autobiography Dancing In The Street, while acknowledging she was given top billing over the Vandellas, and Smokey Robinson with The Miracles. The Temptations, erm, stayed The Temptations – probably because they had more than one lead singer – and Levi Stubbs refused to be separated from the Four Tops: they were family.

Motown’s official announcement about Florence leaving the group was down to exhaustion and her desire to settle down with her family. Another rumour suggested she had merely left the group to recuperate. In less than a week after being fired, Flo was given a release document to sign by Motown’s vice-president Michael Roshkind.

Part of the content referred to Flo being unable to say she was a Supreme, had had nothing to do with The Supremes, and must never refer to herself as an ex-Supreme. That was brutal: how can solid music history be rewritten? Florence was destroyed. The contract also stated she wouldn’t receive any future royalties from the songs she had recorded. “In other words, you’re nothing,” she sighed.

Before Cindy Birdsong was seriously considered as replacement, Marlene Barrow from The Andantes, Motown’s fabulous session group, stepped in. Before this, The Andantes recorded with The Supremes, as Marlene confirmed in Vickie Wright’s book Motown From The Background. “Sometimes there were at least eight of us singing background. The Supremes would be in a booth with us. I remember standing next to Florence singing and we’d be paid two dollars fifty per record. The Andantes were used in the studio so much that we had our own office. It was our place to wait and rest. People think we sang with The Supremes to fill in as Florence was leaving but we were there from the very beginning.”

When The Supremes were booked to perform at the Copacabana during March 1966 (they were now earning $5,000 a week), Florence was ill with the flu and her doctor told Berry Gordy she wouldn’t be well enough to perform. Enter Marlene. She knew all the trio’s songs off by heart, and told J Randy Taraborrelli in Call Her Miss Ross, “the next thing I knew I was working day and night at Mary’s house, trying to learn The Supremes’ act. I don’t ever remember rehearsing with Diana. All of my dealings with her were on stage. I knew it was a temporary situation while they were negotiating to get Cindy Birdsong. I didn’t see Florence during this time and it was kept very quiet that Cindy was in Detroit. So I filled in on the engagements until Cindy was free from her contract with the Bluebelles. It was fun while it lasted.”

Berry Gordy: “Cindy was good. She learned the routines quickly, and, most of all, she was reliable….Finally in July 1967, we all knew (Florence) had to be replaced. At the time we decided not to publicly disclose the reasons for (her) dismissal. In the sixties alcoholism was not dealt with the way it is today. It was something to be kept secret.” It also became apparent that had she got her act together and stayed with Motown, Berry had actually decided to record her as a soloist “but before we could do so she got an offer from ABC Records and severed her relationship with Motown.”

I could continue writing about Florence until the end of my days, but for now, have to pull in the reins here as I’m conscious that space is against me. However, I’d like to think we could return one day.

Sharon Davis