![]() He was still at school when he and a group of friends formed the Romeos, harmonising in the doo-wop style and winning the $100 first prize at the Graystone Ballroom’s talent contest.ĭozier wrote and sang lead on the records they made for a label owned by a local businessman. Lamont was educated at Edgar Allan Poe elementary school, where his love of words and poetry began, at Hutchins junior high school, where he met Aretha Franklin, the daughter of a celebrated local Baptist preacher, and at Northwestern high school, where he picked out songs on a piano, already with the idea of a career in music. Drafted into the US army soon after Lamont was born, later Willie had trouble holding down a job and it was Ethel who kept the family going with her earnings from cooking and cleaning in suburban homes. Willie was 21 and Ethel was 14 when they married and settled in Detroit’s Black Bottom district, originally named for its fertile soil. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Imagesīorn in Detroit, Lamont was the oldest of the five children of Ethel (nee Waters) and Willie Dozier, whose families had migrated north from Alabama and Georgia. Lamont Dozier at the piano with, from left, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, Eddie Holland, Florence Ballard (seated) and Brian Holland in the Motown studio in Detroit, Michigan, c1965. Holland-Dozier-Holland classics include Heat Wave and Nowhere to Run (with Martha and the Vandellas), Can I Get a Witness (Marvin Gaye), Baby I Need Your Loving, I Can’t Help Myself and Reach Out I’ll Be There (Four Tops), This Old Heart of Mine (Isley Brothers), Take Me in Your Arms (Kim Weston) and a record-breaking string of No 1 hits in the US charts for the Supremes, starting with Where Did Our Love Go in 1964 and including Baby Love, Stop! In the Name of Love, You Can’t Hurry Love and You Keep Me Hangin’ On. ![]() Once he had struck up a working partnership with the Hollands, the trio wrote and produced million-selling songs that would help define popular music in the 1960s.ĭozier, who has died aged 81, played his part in many of the songs that built the Motown legend and which now seem as impervious to the ravages of time as those of Rodgers and Hart or Lennon and McCartney. Lamont, after mopping the floors at another label while trying to get his singing and writing career off the ground, had taken the offer of $25 a week from Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy Jr, the money to be advanced against future royalties. She was packing records and doing typing at the offices of Motown Records in Detroit, where the Holland brothers were among many aspirant songwriters and performers vying to come up with the label’s early hits. Lamont Dozier was 20 years old when his wife, Ann, introduced him to Eddie and Brian Holland one day in 1962. ![]()
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