Happy birthday: Motown founder Berry Gordy turns 90

As families across America celebrate Thanksgiving, one native Detroiter is marking a very special personal holiday.

Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. turns 90 on Thursday,  the latest milestone in a storied life that took him from a scrappy east-side upstart to the heights of Hollywood showbiz.

“The real birthplace of the Motown sound was at Harper Hospital in Detroit,” said songwriter and Motown fan Ron Stevenson, citing Gordy’s 1929 birth to the enterprising Berry (Pops) Gordy and Bertha Fuller Gordy. “He called his parents Motown’s top producers because they made him.”

Stevenson wrote a song several years ago titled "Thank You Berry" that was recorded by Raydio's Arnell Carmichael.

It was just blocks from that Harper Hospital where Gordy chose to announce his retirement in September. Onstage at Orchestra Hall to cap an evening of Motown 60th-anniversary festivities, Gordy addressed an audience of Motown artists, fans and family members and looked back poignantly on his career and life in Detroit.

"I have come full circle," he said that night. "It is only appropriate (to announce this) while here in Detroit, the city where my fairy tale happened with all of you."

Gordy was the seventh of his parents' eight children. The onetime boxer and record-shop proprietor had already found songwriting success for the likes of Jackie Wilson when he formed the company that would go on to become Motown Records. Setting up shop in his West Grand Boulevard home, he turned the label into a hit-making juggernaut, making stars out of homegrown talent such as Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, the Temptations and the Four Tops.

Gordy got an early birthday commemoration Monday in Los Angeles, where civic dignitaries and Motown stars such as Robinson and Wonder gathered for the dedication of Berry Gordy Square on Sunset Boulevard — near the building that served as his company's headquarters in the 1970s. 

With a birthday cake wheeled out, Wonder culminated the event by performing his 1980 Motown single "Happy Birthday."

Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.