No fewer than 53 Motown Records singles reached number one on the Billboard pop charts between 1959 and 1988, the years Berry Gordy Jr. owned and operated the company. But the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” got there first, igniting a musical, social and cultural revolution that continues to resound across the decades.
The Marvelettes formed in 1960 in Inkster, Mich., a community populated by Black families employed at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge factory complex (located in neighboring Dearborn, notorious for its strict racial covenants and aggressive approach to housing discrimination). Inkster High choir members Gladys Horton, Georgia Dobbins, Georgeanna Tillman, Katherine Anderson and Juanita Cowart created the group (originally dubbed the Casinyettes, because they “can’t sing yet”) to enter their school’s annual talent competition, which offered as its top prize an audition at Motown, the fledgling Detroit-based record label poised to score its first national hit with Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want),” which in June 1960 climbed to number two on Billboard’s Hot R&B Sides chart and number 23 on the Hot 100. The Miracles’ “Shop Around,” released a few months later, would eventually reach number one on the Billboard R&B chart and number two on the Hot 100, earning Motown its first million seller.
“[Motown] completely transformed the American popular music scene,” writes historian Suzanne E. Smith in 1999’s Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit. “Never before had a Black-owned company been able to create and produce the musical artistry of its own community, and then sell it successfully to audiences across racial boundaries… Before Motown, most Black-owned independent record companies such as Don Robey’s Duke-Peacock label in Houston and Vee-Jay Records in Chicago succeeded primarily within the confines of the rhythm and blues market. Motown’s music defied the internal segregation of the music industry when its records began to sell widely outside conventional Black markets.”
Although the Casinyettes’ rendition of the Chantels’ “Maybe” failed to win over the Inkster High talent judges — the group came in fourth overall — one of the school’s teachers, Shirley Sharpley, conspired to land them a Motown tryout anyway. Motown staffers Brian Holland and Robert Bateman expressed interest in the Casinyettes, resulting in a second audition for Berry Gordy and Miracles leader Smokey Robinson, but Gordy told them to work up original material if they were serious about cutting a record. Dobbins recalled that her friend, pianist William Garrett, was working on a blues song about a postman and asked if she could take a pass at completing it, writing most of the lyrics and eliminating its blues overtones in favor of a more upbeat, doo-wop-inspired approach. “I was waiting for the postman to bring me a letter from this guy who was in the Navy,” Dobbins later told Marc Taylor, author of the 2004 biography The Original Marvelettes: Motown’s Mystery Girl Group. “That’s how I came up with the lyrics. Then I made up the tune. I just hummed it over and over and changed it to the way it should be. I improvised.”
Dobbins is one of five credited songwriters on “Please Mr. Postman,” alongside Garrett, Holland, Bateman and Motown staff writer Freddie Gorman, a former postal carrier. “Once we were back at Motown to audition the song, the producers and musicians there started to fool around with it,” Katherine Anderson told The Wall Street Journal in 2018. “They increased the tempo, added a new beat and made it more up-to-date. Everyone wanted to add their mark to the song. We were just teens and too young to know that someone could take a song and add words. Someone at Motown added the line ‘Deliver the letter, the sooner the better.’ We sang the song a capella, and they loved it. Motown gave us contracts to take home for our parents to sign.” Dobbins does not appear on “Please Mr. Postman,” however: her father, believing the entertainment industry to be sinful, refused to sign off, and by Dobbins’ own account, the experience left her so traumatized that she didn’t sing a note for close to 20 years.
The remaining foursome, renamed the Marvelettes by Gordy himself, added another Inkster High alum, Wanda Young, before returning to Motown’s Hitsville USA studio in April 1961 to record “Please Mr. Postman.” Holland and Bateman co-produced the session under the Brianbert portmanteau, juxtaposing raspy-voiced 15-year-old Gladys Horton’s unforgettably raucous lead with the other Marvelettes’ fizzy harmonies; in addition to Motown session staples Eddie Willis on guitar, James Jamerson on bass and Richard “Popcorn” Wylie on piano, another recent Motown signing — a lanky 22-year-old singer from Washington, D.C. named Marvin Gaye — sat in on drums, injecting a funky urgency absent from previous Motown efforts.
Motown’s Tamla imprint released “Please Mr. Postman” on August 21, 1961, and it spent a total of 23 weeks on the Hot 100, reaching number one on Dec. 11 and selling more than a million copies nationwide along the way — a remarkable achievement at a time when hits by established Black artists typically sold between 100,000 and 300,000 copies at most. Gordy credited the success of “Please Mr. Postman” to Barney Ales, brought in weeks earlier to head up Motown’s sales and promotion units: “the white executive was a pivotal figure at the Black-owned label, helping penetrate key power corridors of the industry establishment,” the Detroit Free Press’ Brian McCollum wrote following Ales’ death in 2020. Gerald Posner’s 2001 book Motown: Money, Power, Sex and Music also notes that Gordy was so focused on producing “crossover music” appealing to audiences of all races that he attempted to distract attention from the company’s stable of Black performers — for example, the covers of the “Please Mr. Postman” single and the subsequent Please Mr. Postman LP both feature a simple line drawing of a mailbox instead of a photo of the Marvelettes.
“The success of ‘Please Mr. Postman’ seemed somehow to further loosen the mood around [Motown] and led to a burst of new songwriting and recording,” Posner writes, name-checking the Miracles’ “You Really Got a Hold on Me” and the Contours’ “Do You Love Me,” written and produced by Berry Gordy himself, although it’s worth noting that Motown did not score its second Billboard number one until Little Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips” exploded in late 1963. “Many inside the company mistakenly thought that the Marvelettes would be the label’s next monster act,” Posner adds, “but the group never again matched the popularity of [‘Please Mr. Postman’].” Its follow-up, “Twistin’ Postman” (which reveals that Horton’s carrier has finally delivered the letter she pined for on the previous single), only reached number 13 on the R&B charts and number 34 on the pop charts, but a third single, the Horton-penned “Playboy,” returned the group to the Top Ten on both charts. The Marvelettes’ commercial fortunes continued to decline, however, and as rival Motown acts like the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas soared in popularity, both Juanita Cowart and Georgeanna Tillman resigned from the group. The Marvelettes nevertheless made an unexpected return to the Top Ten in 1966 with “Don’t Mess with Bill,” written and produced by Smokey Robinson and featuring lead vocals by newlywed Wanda Young Rogers, later the only remaining Marvelette from the group’s classic era to appear on their 1970 Motown swan song, The Return of the Marvelettes.
The story of “Please Mr. Postman” does not end with the Marvelettes, however. Avowed Motown and girl group aficionados the Beatles added the song to their live repertoire in December 1961, just weeks before signing a management deal with Brian Epstein; John Lennon sang lead vocal, Paul McCartney and George Harrison provided backing vocals, and all three contributed the song’s signature handclaps. The Beatles performed “Please Mr. Postman” live on BBC Radio’s Here We Go on Mar. 7, 1962, the first time any Tamla Motown song appeared over BBC airwaves, and a year later, Epstein approached Gordy to secure the rights to record multiple Motown compositions, including “Please Mr. Postman,” “Money (That’s What I Want)” and “You Really Got a Hold On Me.” When Epstein offered only 1.5 cents per record sold instead of the industry-standard two cents, Gordy balked, but finally relented just minutes before Epstein’s offer was set to expire. The Beatles and producer George Martin cut “Please Mr. Postman” at EMI Recording Studios on July 30, 1963, and the completed track closed out the first side of their second Parlophone LP, With the Beatles. Soft-pop pioneers the Carpenters also covered “Please Mr. Postman” in late 1974, topping the Hot 100 early the following year on their way to notching their tenth and final million-selling single.
The original “Please Mr. Postman” remains definitive, although Gladys Horton struggled to come to terms with the song’s legacy as well as the Marvelettes’ place in Motown history. “The postman is a universal figure,” Horton told Birmingham, England pirate radio station PCRL in 1992. “[Getting a letter] is something everybody all over the world can relate to. Then we had a cute little song to go with it. It was the song that broke the doors wide open for [Motown] — that gave them the leeway to do more and more for other artists. But the Marvelettes never got a pat on the back for it. It was like ‘Well, if they don’t know what they did, we’re not gonna tell ‘em.’ They never gave us any credit for what we did.”
Please Mr. Postman (KORD-0047)
