Throughout the 1960s, musicians and record producers puzzled over the precise formula used to create the Motown sound. Was it some special property of the microphones, or the way the snare drum was tuned, or even the kind of carpeting used in the company’s Detroit studio? One vital factor was overlooked, because its presence was almost subliminal: the rhythm guitar playing of Joe Messina, who has died aged 93.
A jazz-trained musician, Messina often did little more on a Motown record than play a chord on every backbeat, the second and fourth beats of each bar. But those downstrokes added a certain thickness and tone to beats already being given their weight by the snare drum and their cutting edge by a tambourine. The result was the kind of dancefloor propulsion heard on Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street, the Miracles’ Going to a Go-Go, the Four Tops’ I Can’t Help Myself and Temptations’ (I Know) I’m Losing You, the sort of hits that would give Motown a vast international following.
Long unknown by name or face to those who bought and danced to the million-selling records on which they played, the Motown session men finally made it into the public eye in 2002, when the award-winning documentary film Standing in the Shadows of Motown revealed their role. The film’s popularity resulted in live reunions that included shows at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, the Royal Festival Hall in London, the opening ceremony for the 2004 Ryder Cup golf tournament at Oakland Hills, just outside Detroit, and the White House, where they were hosted by President George W Bush.
Many were surprised to see a white guitarist among the ranks of the Motown musicians. In the days when he sat between his fellow guitarists Robert White and Eddie Willis, both African Americans, churning out one hit after another in Motown’s Studio A, he liked to refer to himself, in the sort of joke that probably could not be made today, as “the cream in the Oreo cookie”.
Born to Mary and Jasper Messina in Detroit, Joe attended the city’s Central high school and studied music at Cass Tech, the alma mater of many celebrated jazz musicians, before dropping out to pursue a professional career. From the late 1940s he played in Detroit’s jazz clubs and eventually landed a job with the band on the comedian Soupy Sales’ popular nightly TV show, broadcast nationally from a studio in midtown Detroit. A student of bebop, he was proud of playing with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Milt Jackson, among other visiting stars.
At the beginning of the 60s, with the Motown sound in its infancy, Berry Gordy Jr, the company’s founder and president, assembled a cadre of skilled musicians who could be put on salary, guaranteeing their loyalty and their permanent availability for sessions run according to an around-the-clock schedule inspired by Detroit’s automobile production lines. Mickey Stevenson, Gordy’s head of A&R, recommended Messina, who soon found himself among musicians of the calibre of the drummer Benny Benjamin, the bassist James Jamerson, the keyboards players Earl Van Dyke, Joe Hunter and Johnny Griffith, the vibraphone and tambourine exponent Jack Ashford, and the percussionist Eddie “Bongo” Brown.
Known to themselves as the Funk Brothers, they worked day after day in the studio they called the Snakepit. Producers and songwriters such as Stevenson, Smokey Robinson, Lamont Dozier and the brothers Eddie and Brian Holland would often arrive with nothing more than a snatch of melody and hum it to the musicians, who would come up with the framework – the introduction, the background riffs, the turnarounds – that transformed those fragments into gold records. None of the musicians would receive a penny in royalties for their contributions to records still being played six decades later.
Although the three guitarists were all well-rounded players, each had his own speciality. White thumb-picked lyrical intros, Willis added a hint of the blues to the riffs, and Messina hit the backbeat with a plectrum on his customised guitar: a Fender Telecaster with a Jazzmaster neck, strung with heavy-gauge flatwound strings to emphasise the percussive effect.
When Gordy moved the company to Hollywood in 1972, planning to continue making records there while breaking into the movie business, he left almost all his stalwart session musicians behind, many of them stranded without a regular income. Messina put down his guitar to concentrate on his investment in a car-wash business. Not until 2000, when the guitarist Allan Slutsky began approaching the old Motown musicians with the idea that eventually turned into the documentary, did he begin playing seriously again.
In 2013 the surviving Funk Brothers gathered for the unveiling of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: a somewhat ironic accolade, given that Gordy’s Sunset Boulevard dreams had put an end to their work together.
His wife, Josie, died in 2009; although a wheelchair user, she had accompanied him to all the Funk Brothers’ reunion gigs. He is survived by their son, Joel, their daughter, Janice, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
• Joe Messina, guitarist, born 13 December 1928; died 4 April 2022
