The story of The Supremes

Four girls from the Brewster projects

The Supremes story starts in the Brewster-Douglass housing projects of Detroit in 1959. A manager named Milton Jenkins looked after a male vocal group called the Primes, whose members included Paul Williams and Eddie Kendricks, both future Temptations. Jenkins wanted a sister act, and the first girl he found was a teenager called Florence Ballard, a strong, gospel trained singer the family called Blondie. Florence brought in her best friend Mary Wilson, whom she had met at a school talent show. Paul Williams then recruited a neighbour, Diane Ross, and his girlfriend Betty McGlown made four. Jenkins called them the Primettes, and they were soon singing Ray Charles and Drifters songs at sock hops, social clubs and talent shows around the city.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Each girl arrived with her own history. Florence was one of thirteen or more children, and her father Jesse, a General Motors worker and amateur guitarist, taught her songs before he died of cancer when she was sixteen. Mary Wilson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and at three she was sent to Detroit to live with an aunt and uncle. She grew up believing her aunt was her mother, and only learned the truth when her real mother came north years later. Diane Ross had been sent to Alabama as a small child when her mother fell ill with tuberculosis. Back in Detroit she studied dress design at Cass Technical High School, and in 1960 the Hudson's department store hired her as its first African American bus girl.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Primettes quickly stood out, partly because they had their own guitarist, Marv Tarplin, which let them sing live rather than mime. In 1960 they won a talent contest at the Windsor to Detroit Freedom Festival, and Diane asked her old neighbour Smokey Robinson to help them reach Berry Gordy, the songwriter who had just launched Motown. Smokey liked the girls, but he liked their guitarist even more, and with their blessing Tarplin joined the Miracles for the next thirty years. Gordy heard the Primettes sing and told them to come back when they had finished high school. Undeterred, they cut a single for a small local label, Lu Pine, with Diane leading one side and Mary the other. It went nowhere.[1] [2] [3]

That same year brought something far darker. In 1960, according to accounts later told by Mary Wilson, Florence was raped at knifepoint after leaving a dance at Detroit's Graystone Ballroom. The man she named was a local high school basketball player, Reggie Harding. Florence shut herself away at home for weeks before telling Mary and Diane what had happened, and it was never spoken about again. Mary later said she believed the attack fed the cynicism, fear and distrust that shadowed Florence's adult life. Around the same time, Betty McGlown got engaged and left the group, and a singer named Barbara Martin took her place. The four of them now set out to wear Motown down.[1] [2] [3]

The no-hit Supremes

The Primettes practically moved into Motown's Hitsville studio, turning up after school and offering to do anything at all. They sang backing vocals and clapped hands on records by Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells and others. In January 1961 Gordy finally agreed to sign them, on one condition. They needed a new name. Motown staffer Janie Bradford brought a list of suggestions, with choices like the Darleens, the Melodees and the Jewelettes. Florence was the only one at the studio that day, and she picked the Supremes, reportedly because it was the only name that did not end in ettes. The others were unimpressed. Diane worried people would think they were a male group. They signed as the Supremes on the fifteenth of January 1961.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Success did not follow. Between 1961 and 1963 the Supremes released a string of singles, starting with I Want a Guy, and none cracked the top forty. Florence led a lively number called Buttered Popcorn that did well in the Midwest but still failed to chart nationally. At this stage all three shared the leads. Mary favoured soft ballads, Florence belted out hard driving soul, and Diane went for mainstream pop. Around the Motown offices they became a running joke, the no-hit Supremes. Mary later told Billboard that she coined the nickname herself, because she could see what the other acts were thinking. They kept doing session work, and Florence even stood in for a pregnant Marvelette on tour in 1962.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The line-up shrank that spring. Barbara Martin was pregnant, and although her husband supported her staying, she left in early 1962, leaving the trio of Diane, Florence and Mary. She had sung on most of their first album, Meet the Supremes, but she was not pictured on its cover. Martin later earned a psychology degree and worked in mental health, and out of respect for her old friends she almost never gave interviews. The turn in the Supremes' fortunes came in late 1963, with When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes. It reached number twenty three, and it was their first song by the writing and production team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland.[1] [2] [3]

That record also settled a question that would shape everything that followed. At the end of 1963 Berry Gordy made Diane the official lead singer of the Supremes. Florence's big voice was widely considered the strongest in the group. Marvin Gaye, who used her as a backing singer, called her probably the strongest of the three. According to Mary, Florence sang so loudly that she had to stand seventeen feet from the microphone in the studio. But Gordy heard something in Diane's lighter, sweeter tone that he believed could cross over to white pop radio. Florence kept singing one solo in concert, the Barbra Streisand standard People, for the next two years. On the records, though, the spotlight now belonged to Diane.[1] [2] [3]

Where did our love go

In the spring of 1964 Holland, Dozier and Holland brought the Supremes a gentle, stomping song called Where Did Our Love Go. The group did not like it. Florence wanted something punchier, like the Marvelettes' Please Mr. Postman, and they thought the new tune sounded childish. With no hits to their name, they had little say. Diane was coached to sing in a lower register than she liked, and the backing was built on handclaps and foot stomps. Released on the seventeenth of June 1964, it entered the chart at number seventy seven. By August it was number one in America for two weeks, and number three in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

The Supremes heard the news on the road. They were on Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars package tour, and they had started at the bottom of the bill. By the end of the tour they were at the top. Touring in those years had real dangers, too. Early on, on a trip through the Deep South, rocks were thrown at the Supremes' tour bus. Where Did Our Love Go reached number one just weeks after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and Mary Wilson later said the song's peaceful message fit the moment. The Library of Congress later added it to the National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then the hits kept coming. Baby Love, built deliberately to sound like its predecessor, went to number one in both America and Britain in the autumn of 1964, the first time a Motown act had topped the American chart more than once. Come See About Me followed, trading the number one spot with the Beatles' I Feel Fine over Christmas and New Year. Stop! In the Name of Love came next, with its famous hand out, palm forward routine, and then Back in My Arms Again. That was five American number ones in a row. On the twenty seventh of December 1964 they made the first of seventeen appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The money changed their lives almost overnight. In January 1965 each of the three young women received a cheque for a hundred thousand dollars in earnings from the year before. They used part of it to buy houses for their families on the same street, moving them out of the projects. In Britain, Motown launched its own Tamla Motown label that March, and its very first release was Stop! In the Name of Love. The Supremes toured the world and became almost as big abroad as at home. They sang on film soundtracks, appeared in the 1965 beach movie Beach Ball, and endorsed so many products that at one point they had their own brand of bread.[1] [2]

Gowns, gloves and the Copacabana

Berry Gordy wanted the Supremes to appeal to everyone, black and white, teenagers and their parents. Motown ran what amounted to a finishing school, and the Supremes went through all of it. Maxine Powell taught them etiquette and deportment, and told them to be ready to perform for kings and queens. Choreographer Cholly Atkins designed graceful moves that suited tight sheath dresses, and musical director Maurice King polished their act. They wore detailed make-up, wigs and high fashion gowns, and they were marketed as three distinct personalities, something new at the time. Gordy booked them into supper clubs like the Copacabana in New York, where they added Broadway and pop standards to the hits.[1] [2] [3]

In mid 1965 the run of number ones broke when Nothing but Heartaches stalled at number eleven. Gordy was furious, and he sent a memo around Motown saying the company would release nothing less than top ten records, and that for the Supremes, because of their worldwide appeal, it would release only number ones. Holland, Dozier and Holland responded by tearing up their formula. The result was I Hear a Symphony, a more complex, building song that went to number one in November 1965. Diana Ross, who had begun using that name in 1965 after a mistake on her birth certificate, later said it was one of her favourite songs to perform, even though its key was a challenge.[1] [2]

1966 was a year of records. You Can't Hurry Love, inspired in part by a gospel song by Dorothy Love Coates, went to number one in September. Its parent album, The Supremes A' Go-Go, made history on the chart dated the twenty second of October 1966. It became the first album by an all-female group to reach number one on the Billboard album chart, knocking the Beatles' Revolver off the top. No other female group would do that until the Go-Go's in 1982. On that album Lamont Dozier gave Mary Wilson a rare lead vocal, on a Martha and the Vandellas song, because he felt her voice suited it best.[1] [2] [3]

Then came You Keep Me Hangin' On, a harder, more urgent sound. The story goes that its stabbing guitar figure grew out of a Morse code style sound effect Lamont Dozier heard on the radio before news bulletins. The producers cut it in eight sessions before they were happy, and it went to number one in November 1966. The group's grip on television was just as firm. Ed Sullivan grew fond of the three young women, and his musical director Bob Arthur is credited with persuading Diana to add classic show tunes to her repertoire. Early in 1967 Love Is Here and Now You're Gone, with Diana's dramatic spoken passages, became their ninth number one.[1] [2] [3]

Diana Ross and the Supremes

Behind the gowns, the group was coming apart. Diana and Berry Gordy had begun a romantic relationship in 1965, and many at Motown felt he lavished attention on the group and on her in particular. According to a BBC history of the group, Gordy sent roses to Diana before shows, and none to Florence or Mary. Diana began answering interview questions aimed at the others and pushed for more pay. In 1967 Gordy renamed the act, first briefly as the Supremes with Diana Ross, then as Diana Ross and the Supremes. He argued that billing a star plus a group let Motown charge more for bookings. As early as 1966 he had even considered taking Diana solo and replacing her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Florence took it hardest. She blamed Motown for making Diana the star and destroying the group's balance, and she sank into depression and began drinking heavily. She gained weight, missed recording sessions, and sometimes arrived at shows too drunk to perform. For some early 1967 dates, Marlene Barrow of Motown's session group the Andantes stood in. Mary tried to hold the middle ground in public, but privately she warned Florence that Diana and Gordy wanted her out. In April 1967 Gordy called Cindy Birdsong, a singer from Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles who looked a little like Florence. Birdsong later said she arrived at Gordy's house just as Florence walked out of a meeting in tears.[1] [2] [3]

Cindy Birdsong first stood in for Florence at a Hollywood Bowl benefit concert on the twenty ninth of April 1967. Florence came back in May, believing she was on probation. In fact Gordy was only waiting to buy Birdsong out of her contract, and Birdsong was quietly travelling with the group, learning the routines. That May the Supremes had their tenth number one, The Happening, a film theme. Florence's last Ed Sullivan appearance came on the seventh of May, broadcast live from Expo 67 in Montreal. For those two months Florence slimmed down and turned up on time and sober. It did not save her.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty ninth of June 1967 the group opened at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, billed for the first time as Diana Ross and the Supremes. On the first of July, the day after her twenty fourth birthday, Florence found a spare set of gowns in the dressing room, made for Cindy Birdsong. She went on stage drunk that night, and during one routine she pushed her stomach out through her costume. Gordy sent her home to Detroit and she never sang with the group again. Birdsong took her place at the second show that same night. Motown told the press Florence was taking time off for exhaustion.[1] [2] [3]

The first single under the new name was Reflections, a trippy, psychedelic record whose eerie electronic sounds came from a test oscillator. It reached number two in September 1967, one of the last Supremes hits by Holland, Dozier and Holland, who left Motown soon after in a dispute over royalties. Florence's release was finalised on the twenty second of February 1968, with a one off payment of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars. A week later she married Thomas Chapman, a Motown chauffeur. She signed to ABC Records, but her two singles flopped and her album was shelved. Her settlement money drained away through a management firm whose head later faced embezzlement charges.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Love Child and the long goodbye

Without Holland, Dozier and Holland, the hits slowed down. Gordy gathered a team of writers at Detroit's Pontchartrain Hotel, calling themselves the Clan, and told them to come up with something big. They wrote Love Child, a song about poverty and a girl born out of wedlock, bold subject matter for a pop single in 1968. It reached number one in November, finally knocking the Beatles' Hey Jude off the top after nine weeks. As on most Diana Ross and the Supremes singles of this period, Mary and Cindy were not on it. Motown's session singers, the Andantes, sang the backing vocals.[1] [2]

When they launched Love Child on Ed Sullivan, the group swapped their gowns for cut off jeans, T-shirts and bare feet. Some black viewers complained, and they soon went back to glamour. Motown also paired them with the Temptations, the group that had grown partly out of the old Primes. Their joint album reached number two in America and spent four weeks at number one in Britain, and their television special TCB aired in December 1968. The pressure on Diana was enormous. In her memoir she wrote that anxiety over Gordy's demands left her struggling with anorexia, and she collapsed on stage in Boston in 1967 and was hospitalised for exhaustion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 1969 Cindy Birdsong became the victim of a terrifying crime. Returning to her Los Angeles apartment with her boyfriend Charles Hewlett and a friend, she was confronted by an intruder who made her tie up the two men, then forced her into her car at knifepoint. As he drove, she managed to unlock the door and threw herself out onto the Long Beach Freeway. She was treated in hospital for cuts, bruises and knife wounds. Days later a maintenance man from her building, Charles Collier, surrendered to police in Las Vegas. In April 1970 he was sentenced to five years to life, saying he did not know why he had done it.[1] [2]

By then Diana's solo career was an open secret. Johnny Bristol had cut a backing track for a song called Someday We'll Be Together, first written in 1961, and Gordy decided it would be Diana's first solo single. Bristol struggled to get the performance he wanted, so he sang along with her, and the engineer accidentally recorded both voices. Bristol's encouragement stayed on the record. Gordy then released it under the group's name, even though Mary and Cindy did not sing on it. It went to number one in the final Billboard chart of 1969, the last number one of the decade. On the twenty first of December the three sang it on Ed Sullivan, and Sullivan told viewers Diana was leaving.[1] [2]

Gordy had already chosen Diana's replacement. He had seen Jean Terrell, sister of the heavyweight boxer Ernie Terrell, singing with her brother's band in Miami. She rehearsed with Mary and Cindy by day while they toured with Diana at night. Diana Ross and the Supremes played their last show on the fourteenth of January 1970 at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, closing with Someday We'll Be Together, and Jean was introduced on stage afterwards. According to Mary, Gordy then told her he wanted to swap Jean for Syreeta Wright. Mary refused, and she said Gordy responded by washing his hands of the group.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The seventies Supremes

The new Supremes came out strongly. Up the Ladder to the Roof, recorded just two weeks after Diana left, reached the American top ten in the spring of 1970 and number six in Britain. Its producer Frank Wilson then found Stoned Love through a Detroit teenager called Kenny Thomas, who played it for him on a guitar with only two strings. Thomas meant it as Stone Love, a love that never changes, but it was mislabelled on release, and some radio stations suspected a drug reference. Even so it became the group's last American top ten hit and last R&B number one, and it reached number three in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

For a while the hits held up. River Deep, Mountain High, recorded with the Four Tops, and Nathan Jones both did well, and Smokey Robinson's Floy Joy in 1972 became the only Supremes hit on which Mary shared the lead. But Motown was busy moving to Los Angeles to make films, starting with Diana's Lady Sings the Blues, and the Supremes got little promotion. Cindy Birdsong left in April 1972 to have a baby, and Lynda Laurence, from Stevie Wonder's backing group, replaced her. An album produced by Jimmy Webb flopped, and Stevie Wonder's Bad Weather stalled at number eighty seven. In 1973 Laurence left expecting a child, Cindy came back, and a discouraged Jean Terrell quit.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Meanwhile Florence Ballard's life had fallen apart. In 1971 she sued Motown for eight point seven million dollars, claiming Gordy and Diana had conspired to push her out, and she lost. She separated from her husband after domestic disputes, and the Guardian later described her as a victim of spousal abuse. Her house was foreclosed, and in 1974 newspapers reported that the former Supreme was on welfare. That year Mary invited her on stage at Magic Mountain, and Florence played tambourine but would not sing. After treatment for alcoholism, things turned. An insurance settlement over her old lawyer let her buy a house, she reconciled with her husband, and in June 1975 she sang in public again in Detroit.[1] [2] [3]

The comeback did not last. On the twenty first of February 1976 Florence checked into a Detroit hospital complaining of numbness in her arms and legs. She died the next morning, the twenty second of February, of cardiac arrest caused by a blood clot in a coronary artery. She was thirty two, and she left three daughters. It was exactly eight years to the day since Motown had paid her off. Diana Ross came to the funeral and was reunited with Mary there. The New York Times obituary noted that the woman who had helped make the Supremes stars had spent her last years living on welfare.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mary carried on with a new lead singer, Scherrie Payne, sister of the singer Freda Payne, and started taking far more leads herself. They scored disco hits like He's My Man, and in 1976 Holland, Dozier and Holland came back to produce the album High Energy, which gave them a final top forty single, I'm Gonna Let My Heart Do the Walking. Cindy Birdsong was let go in February 1976, and Susaye Greene, another veteran of Stevie Wonder's band, took her place. After one more album, Mary announced she was going solo. The Supremes played their farewell concert at the Drury Lane Theatre in London on the twelfth of June 1977. Motown then retired the name.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Dreamgirls, reunions and lawsuits

Mary spent the next few years honouring leftover Supremes bookings as Mary Wilson of the Supremes, at first with Cindy Birdsong and later with hired backing singers. Her 1979 solo album for Motown sold poorly, and Variety reported that Marvin Gaye had planned to produce it before his divorce from Gordy's sister derailed that. Then, in December 1981, the Broadway musical Dreamgirls opened, the story of a Chicago girl group called the Dreams whose lead singer is pushed forward by her powerful manager lover while the overweight, big voiced Effie is fired in Las Vegas. Mary loved the show. Diana Ross reportedly did not, and she said she never went to see it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty fifth of March 1983 the three most famous surviving Supremes, Diana, Mary and Cindy, finally shared a stage again, at the taping of the television special Motown 25 in Pasadena. There had been almost no rehearsal, and a planned medley was cut to a single song, Someday We'll Be Together. What happened next became a scandal. Reports described Diana pushing Mary aside and pressing her microphone down when Mary introduced Berry Gordy herself. The moment was edited out of the broadcast, but it was widely reported. When the show aired in May, forty seven million people watched. The trio never reunited again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1986 Mary published her memoir, Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme, named after the musical. It became a New York Times bestseller for months and set a sales record for a rock memoir. It was also the first tell all book by a member of the Motown family, and it painted Diana, whom Mary pointedly called Diane, as a spotlight hungry diva. Some readers nicknamed it Diana Dearest. In 1988 the Ross, Wilson and Ballard line-up was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Little Richard, with Florence honoured after her death. Mary was the only Supreme present at all three of the group's big honours, the Hall of Fame, the Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 1994 and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1998.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mary's hardest loss came in January 1994. She and her fourteen year old son Rafael were driving on Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas when their Jeep veered off the highway and overturned. Mary was injured. Rafael died. Two years later she took on a different kind of fight. In 1996 she sued former Supremes Scherrie Payne and Lynda Laurence, and several others, for using the Supremes name in their own touring groups. A Los Angeles judge ruled in 1997 that Motown, not Mary, owned the name, and the federal appeals court agreed in 1999. She turned that defeat into a campaign for Truth in Music laws, which were eventually passed in more than half the states.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2000 came one more attempt at a reunion, the Return to Love tour. Mary and Cindy were approached late, negotiations over money broke down publicly, and Diana went out instead with Scherrie Payne and Lynda Laurence, two Supremes she had never sung with. Critics called it a Diana Ross show with backing singers, and the best seats cost about five hundred dollars a pair. In Columbus, Ohio, only three thousand of nineteen thousand seats were sold. In July the promoter pulled the plug with about half the dates unplayed. Diana said she was severely disappointed. Cindy said she and Mary were still open to starting over.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The last Supremes and the legacy

Dreamgirls returned as a film in 2006, and it made the parallels far more explicit, down to copies of real Supremes gowns and album covers. Jennifer Hudson won an Academy Award for playing Effie, and in her Golden Globe speech she dedicated her win to Florence Ballard. Berry Gordy called the film's portrait of the Gordy like manager completely wrong. Mary, always the keeper of the flame, had stored the group's stage clothes for decades, and in 2008 more than fifty of their gowns went on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2004 she and Cindy Birdsong sang Supremes hits with Kelly Rowland of Destiny's Child on the Motown 45 special.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Florence's story kept attracting tragedy even after her death. Around 2010 a film about her life, to be called Blondie and based on Peter Benjaminson's biography The Lost Supreme, was announced with Faith Evans cast as Florence. Evans later quit, calling the producer a fraud. She was right. The producer, who called herself Karen Spencer, turned out to be Jami McCoy, a bank fraudster who had jumped bail in Texas. Federal marshals arrested her, and she was sentenced to four years and three months in prison. No film was ever made. Mary, meanwhile, spent her last years campaigning for a postage stamp in Florence's honour.[1] [2] [3]

Mary Wilson never slowed down. She earned a degree from New York University in 2001, served as a cultural ambassador for the State Department, lobbied Congress on artists' rights, and in 2019 competed on Dancing with the Stars and published Supreme Glamour, a book about the group's gowns. On the eighth of February 2021 she died in her sleep at her home in Henderson, Nevada, of heart disease linked to high blood pressure. She was seventy six. Just two days earlier she had posted a video announcing new music with Universal. Diana Ross wrote that each day is a gift, and that the Supremes would live on in our hearts.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cindy Birdsong's later years were painful. After leaving the group she said she had signed a bad deal with Motown that left her broke. She took an office job, turned to religion, and withdrew from public life. After several strokes, she was removed from her Los Angeles apartment by police in 2021, at her family's urging, and placed in a nursing home. Her relatives accused her longtime friend and roommate of isolating her, a claim the friend denied, and in October 2023 a judge granted the family conservatorship. The New York Times reported that when Eddie Holland visited and sang Baby Love at her bedside, she smiled and gripped his fingers.[1] [2]

In 2023 the Supremes, as Diana, Mary and Florence, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, having never won a competitive Grammy. Their tally stands at twelve American number one singles, more than any other American group, and second only to the Beatles among all groups. Their influence runs through the Three Degrees, the Pointer Sisters, En Vogue, TLC and Destiny's Child, and Madonna said that as a child she cared more about the Supremes than the Beatles. As of 2026, Diana Ross is the only surviving member of the original trio, and she is still performing. Florence, Mary, Betty McGlown and Barbara Martin have all died.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around The Supremes

Diana Ross and Mary Wilson. They met as teenagers in the Brewster projects and sang together for more than a decade, with Mary often the peacemaker. After Diana left in 1970 they rarely spoke. Mary's 1986 memoir portrayed Diana as a spotlight hungry diva, the 1983 Motown 25 reunion ended in a shoving incident, and the 2000 tour talks collapsed over money. Mary said in 2000 that she was still waiting for her best friend. When Mary died, Diana wrote that the Supremes would live on in our hearts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Diana Ross and Florence Ballard. Florence founded the group and chose its name, but Diana became its star. Florence blamed Motown for making Diana the focus and felt the balance of the group was destroyed. Their arguments grew as Florence drank more heavily, and after her firing she sued, claiming Diana and Berry Gordy had plotted to push her out. Diana attended Florence's funeral in 1976, where she was reunited with Mary Wilson.[1] [2] [3]

Diana Ross and Berry Gordy. The Motown founder made Diana the Supremes' lead singer in 1963 and began a romance with her in 1965 that lasted several years. He renamed the group around her and steered her into a solo film career with Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany, where they clashed on set. Their daughter Rhonda was born in 1971, after Diana married Robert Silberstein, and Diana told Rhonda the truth about her father when she was thirteen.[1] [2] [3]

Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard. They met at a school talent show and were best friends before the Primettes existed. It was Florence who brought Mary into the group. As Florence spiralled, she leaned on Mary for advice, and Mary privately warned her that she was about to be pushed out. In 1974 Mary invited her on stage, and after Florence's death Mary dedicated her memoir to her and campaigned for a postage stamp in her honour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Supremes and Holland-Dozier-Holland. Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland wrote and produced ten of the Supremes' twelve number ones, from Where Did Our Love Go to The Happening. Mary recalled that Eddie taught them how to sing each song, Brian was the musical genius and Lamont brought a gospel feel. The team left Motown in a royalty dispute, then returned to produce the Supremes' High Energy album in 1976.[1] [2] [3]

Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson. Smokey lived on Diana's street when they were children, and he helped the Primettes reach Motown in exchange for their guitarist. In a 2023 Guardian interview he revealed that, while he was married to Claudette Robinson, he and Diana had an affair that lasted about a year. He said Diana ended it because she knew Claudette and knew he still loved his wife.[1] [2] [3]

The Supremes and The Temptations. The two groups were family from the start. The Primettes were created as the sister act to the Primes, whose Paul Williams and Eddie Kendricks became Temptations, and it was Paul Williams who brought Diane Ross into the group. In the late sixties Motown paired the acts for two albums and two television specials, and on Ed Sullivan in 1967 they swapped each other's hits. Otis Williams said they were almost inseparable.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Mary Wilson and Pedro Ferrer. Mary married the Dominican businessman Pedro Ferrer in Las Vegas in 1974 after choosing him as the Supremes' manager. He was the one who told Motown she would leave the group to go solo. They had three children, Turkessa, Pedro Junior and Rafael, and divorced in 1981. Rafael was killed in a car crash in 1994, aged fourteen.[1] [2]

Mary Wilson and Duke Fakir. In the mid sixties Mary was briefly engaged to Duke Fakir of the Four Tops, Motown's other great vocal group. The engagement did not last, and Mary was also linked over the years to Tom Jones, Steve McQueen and David Frost. Fakir, the last surviving original Four Top, died in 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Mary Wilson and Scherrie Payne and Lynda Laurence. Mary hired both women into the Supremes in the seventies and, as she put it, taught them how to be Supremes. Later they toured as the Former Ladies of the Supremes, and in 1996 Mary sued them over the name and lost. In 2000 they joined Diana Ross on the Return to Love tour that Mary had turned down.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cindy Birdsong and Patti LaBelle. Cindy sang with Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles for years before Motown called. She did not even tell Patti she was flying to Detroit, and the Blue Belles' lawyers filed an injunction when she appeared with the Supremes. The old friends reunited in 1999, when the group, by then called Labelle, accepted a lifetime achievement award together.[1] [2]

Rare facts about The Supremes

• Florence Ballard and Betty McGlown, two of the four original Primettes, shared a birthday, the thirtieth of June. Florence was born on the thirtieth of June 1943 and Betty two years earlier on the same date. Betty left in 1960 to marry, and her only known recordings are the backing vocals on the Primettes' Lu Pine single.[1] [2] [3]
• Diane Ross feared the name Supremes would sound like a male group, and a male doo-wop group called the Supremes really had existed. MusicBrainz lists a 1950s doo-wop group from Columbus, Ohio, called the Supremes, along with several other small groups of that name, all before the Motown trio signed on the fifteenth of January 1961.[1] [2]
• Diana Ross's first name came from a clerical error on her birth certificate. Her mother named her Diane, but the certificate was filled out as Diana. Family and Detroit friends kept calling her Diane, and her bandmates were surprised when she began using Diana professionally in 1965.[1]
• Smokey Robinson's longtime guitarist Marv Tarplin was originally the Primettes' guitarist. Smokey agreed to help the girls reach Motown but wanted their guitarist too. Tarplin went on to play with Smokey for more than thirty years, and Diana later wrote that it was a fair trade.[1] [2]
• Mary Wilson coined the mocking nickname the no-hit Supremes herself. She told Billboard she could see that the other Motown acts thought the trio would never have a hit, so she came up with the name before anyone else could.[1]
• Florence Ballard sang so powerfully that she had to stand seventeen feet from the studio microphone. That is according to Mary Wilson. Marvin Gaye, who used Florence as a backing singer, called her probably the strongest singer of the three.[1]
• The foot stomps on Baby Love were made by a teenager named Mike Valvano. Holland, Dozier and Holland built Baby Love to echo Where Did Our Love Go, reusing the cooing lead, the backing chant and the stomping. It was also the last sixties single on which Florence and Mary had solo ad libs.[1]
• Where Did Our Love Go was played to astronauts in orbit. In August 1965 the song was transmitted to the crew of the Gemini 5 mission while they circled the Earth.[1]
• Another singer released Come See About Me before the Supremes did. Nella Dodds put out a version that reached number seventy four. The Supremes had recorded it first, so Motown rushed their version out as a single, which killed Dodds' sales. It went on to trade the number one spot with the Beatles.[1]
• Stop! In the Name of Love was the very first release on Britain's Tamla Motown label. Motown's records had appeared in Britain on several other labels before EMI created Tamla Motown in March 1965, launching it with the Supremes.[1]
• The Supremes recorded some of their hits in German and Italian. Come See About Me became Johnny und Joe in German, and You Can't Hurry Love was released in Italian as L'amore verrà.[1] [2]
• At the height of their fame the Supremes had their own brand of bread. They endorsed dozens of products in the mid sixties, appeared in the 1965 film Beach Ball, and recorded songs for film soundtracks.[1]
• Berry Gordy once decreed in a memo that the Supremes would release only number one records. After Nothing but Heartaches stalled just outside the top ten in 1965, Gordy said Motown would release nothing less than top ten records, and for the Supremes only number ones. I Hear a Symphony was the answer.[1]
• The Supremes A' Go-Go knocked the Beatles' Revolver off the top of the album chart. On the chart dated the twenty second of October 1966 it became the first number one album by an all-female group. No female group matched that until the Go-Go's in 1982.[1] [2]
• A 2017 reissue created a duet between Diana Ross and Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops that never happened in real life. Both groups had recorded Shake Me, Wake Me in the same key, so the reissue team combined the two vocals over the Funk Brothers' track.[1]
• The spooky sounds on Reflections were not a Moog synthesizer. The record is often called one of the first pop hits with a Moog, but the effects came from a test oscillator run through tape echo. The song later became the theme of the television series China Beach.[1]
• Love Child ended the nine week run of the Beatles' Hey Jude at number one in America. It was written by a team who called themselves the Clan, and it spent eleven weeks in the top ten, longer than any other Supremes hit.[1]
• The Supremes once played a trio of singing nuns on the television series Tarzan. They appeared in a 1968 episode of the NBC adventure show, dressed as nuns.[1] [2]
• On Ed Sullivan in 1967, the Supremes and the Temptations swapped hits. The Supremes sang Get Ready and I'm Losing You, while the Temptations sang Stop! In the Name of Love and Baby Love. The pairing's success led NBC to give them two specials.[1]
• The Supremes sang a five minute medley of Irving Berlin songs with Ethel Merman on Ed Sullivan. It was part of a tribute to Berlin on the fifth of May 1968. The show's musical director is credited with steering Diana toward classic show tunes.[1]
• You can hear the producer singing along on Someday We'll Be Together. Johnny Bristol sang with Diana to coax a better performance, and the engineer accidentally recorded him too. He kept his ad libs on the record, which topped the last Billboard chart of the sixties.[1]
• Someday We'll Be Together was first released in 1961 by a duo called Johnny and Jackey. Johnny Bristol and Jackey Beavers cut it for the small Tri-Phi label, which Motown later bought, bringing the song into its catalogue.[1]
• The writer of Stoned Love was credited as Yennek Samoht. Kenny Thomas spelled his name backwards, copying Stevie Wonder's alias Eivets Rednow, and liked that Samoht sounded a little like his idol Nina Simone. The Stone Roses later used the song as their walk on music.[1]
• Cindy Birdsong and Florence Ballard wore the same shoe and dress size. The resemblance helped when Cindy was brought in to replace Florence, making the change look seamless to audiences.[1]
• Cindy Birdsong and Lynda Laurence's sister replaced each other in two different groups. Cindy first joined the Ordettes, the forerunners of Patti LaBelle's Blue Belles, in place of Sundray Tucker. In 1972 Tucker's younger sister Lynda Laurence replaced Cindy in the Supremes.[1] [2]
• Jean Terrell's brother Ernie was a heavyweight boxing champion who fought Muhammad Ali. Jean sang in her brother's band, Ernie Terrell and the Knockouts, which is where Berry Gordy spotted her in Miami in 1969.[1]
• Scherrie Payne sang the original lead on Want Ads, a song that became a number one for another group. Payne's group the Glass House recorded it first, but the Payne sisters suggested it to Honey Cone, whose version topped the chart.[1]
• Susaye Greene, the last woman to join the Supremes, co-wrote a song on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. She wrote I Can't Help It with Stevie Wonder. She had also sung in Ray Charles's Raelettes and Stevie Wonder's Wonderlove.[1]
• Mary Wilson holds the record for the longest gap between hits on Billboard's Dance Club Songs chart. Her single Red Hot entered in October 1979, and Time to Move On entered in November 2015, a gap of thirty six years and seven weeks.[1]
• Martha Reeves and Mary Wilson studied singing with the same high school teacher. Both were taught by Abraham Silver at Detroit's Northeastern High School, as was Florence Ballard. Martha and Mary later roomed together on the first Motortown Revue tour.[1] [2]
• Florence Ballard sang at one of Richard Nixon's inaugural balls. In January 1969, during her short solo career with ABC Records, she performed at a ball for the newly elected president.[1]
• The Supremes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Little Richard. He said at the 1988 ceremony that they were more of a women group than a girl group, and so popular they rivalled the Beatles.[1]
• Forty seven million people watched the brief Supremes reunion on Motown 25. According to Nielsen, about thirty five percent of American homes with a television switched on were watching the May 1983 broadcast.[1]
• Mary Wilson was the first contestant voted off her season of Dancing with the Stars. She and her partner Brandon Armstrong were eliminated first in September 2019, at the age of seventy five.[1]
• Barbara Martin, a founding Supreme, became a mental health worker and almost never spoke about the group. Out of respect for Diana and Mary she refused interviews for decades, making one exception in 2009 for an expanded edition of Meet the Supremes.[1]
• The 1983 Motown 25 special was the only time Diana, Mary and Cindy performed together after 1970. The planned medley was cut to one song, and Florence Ballard's death in 1976 meant the classic trio could never reunite.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.