She had won an amateur contest — nothing more than that — when a producer named William Stevenson crossed the room and told her she had talent. The next morning, Martha Reeves showed up at Hitsville USA unannounced, and was handed a job as secretary. It was, she says now, simply being at the right place at the right time, though those who were there tend to describe the whole era in grander terms: as the richest and most exciting period of popular music since the German and Italian classical masters of the nineteenth century reshaped what sound could mean. The connection between Motown and the Ford motor plant, which Detroit has long worn like a badge, is not merely poetic.

Berry Gordy, who founded the label, had himself worked on the Ford assembly line, and so had Reeves's own father. Gordy carried that education with him into the recording studio — the assignments, the structure, the disciplined production of something beautiful at scale. Motor City and music, Reeves suggests, were never really two different things at all: they were one city's single, relentless ambition expressed through different hands. When asked who was the greatest artist on the Motown roster, Reeves deflects with the warmth of someone who genuinely cannot choose.

She met Stevie Wonder when he was nine years old, conducting an adult choir in a Pentecostal church — and she offers that image not as anecdote but as evidence.