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)” and later collaborated on such classics as “I Heard It Through the Grapevine' and “War,” has died.
FILE - Motown's Barrett Strong arrives at the induction ceremony for 35th annual National Academy of Popular Music/Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York on June 10, 2004. Strong, one of Motowns founding artists and most gifted songwriters who sang lead on the companys breakthrough single Money and later collaborated with 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, Jan.
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,” a million-seller released early in 1960 and Motown’s first major hit. Strong never again approached the success of “Money” on his own, and decades later fought for acknowledgement that he helped write it.
“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 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.”
Strong was born in West Point, Mississippi 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.
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