“But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz

I got this book ages ago and just never had the chance to pick it up. But then very conveniently, I read it while I was on vacation right before heading to the Motown Museum in Detroit! So I’ll throw in a few thoughts on that as well.

The book is formatted in a really interesting way. The authors conducted oral interviews with many people involved in the Motown girl groups that were all the rage in the 50s and 60s. The book then consists of quotes from all of these interviews put together thematically and chronologically. There are a few author’s notes here and there but it is primarily just quotes. The result is that it can feel a little disconnected, I mean the quotes all go together but there are some sections I had to reread to figure out who we are all talking about and things like that. It is cool though that you get multiple perspectives from a single passage.

I know a few things about the girl groups, I really like the Shirelles and the Marvelettes, but largely I was a novice coming in. I certainly didn’t know the names of the girls! So I thought it was really cool to get a peak behind the music at the individuals involved. I also know vaguely that Motown was exploitative of its artists, but it is wild to read about how the girls didn’t get paid and rarely even had the rights to their names.

I would say that this is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in these groups, whether you are knowledgeable or not. It’s a cool intro to these groups, and I bet even people who know a lot can learn things from the interviews.

Now I mentioned visiting the Motown Museum and I was really surprised by that experience. Of course it’s very pro-Motown as a company and it doesn’t mention any of the issues with artists getting paid or anything like that. But I was shocked that the Shirelles aren’t anywhere in the museum that I could find. They were Motown’s biggest girl group, they should have been celebrated there! And after reading this book, I think that’s because they were one of the few groups that fought to keep the rights to their name. So it’s a little bit of a fuck you to them. And seeing the physical location of the recording studio was cool, but honestly? I liked the experience of reading the book better. I felt I got more out of it.

So you heard it here, I preferred this book to the physical location talked about. It was super cool to pair them together, but reading the book felt so much more comprehensive and accurate to what the performers were experiencing then.