I have long admired Beyoncé for her ability to balance a provocative, sexy stage style with a mostly classy offstage image. She displays a quality that is all too rarely seen in pop stars, a gracefulness that has come about because the R&B songstress was raised to treat people well.
“Grace is the growth of habit,” wrote 18th-century French moralist Joseph Joubert. “This charming quality requires practice if it is to become lasting.”
Imagine an institution that teaches young celebs to carry themselves with grace, to be considerate of the public to whom they owe their stardom, to govern their bodies and their reputations with care. And to awaken in others a similar respect. That existed in the early years of Motown.
Indirectly, Beyoncé is a beneficiary of it.
Beyoncé’s father, Mathew Knowles, looked to Motown in managing his daughter’s career for nearly two decades. Knowles took as his model Motown founder Berry Gordy jr, who made sure the artists signed to his record label were groomed for all facets of celebrity life.
In essence, Beyoncé absorbed the legacy of one of Gordy’s advisers, a woman named Maxine Powell. Powell was petite and tough-minded, a former model and actress whose convictions about grace gave her a profound influence on American culture of the 20th century.
For five years in the 1960s, she ran the Motown Artist Development Finishing School, instructing the label’s teenagers in how to sit, stand, walk, dress, talk to fans and reporters, and sidestep the public blunders that can tank a career.
“Finishing school” may seem a quaint notion, but in fact Powell was creating a new reality with age-old conventions of dignity, a well-groomed appearance and personal integrity. Powell created an indelible look and manner for a new generation of American artists, underscoring the importance of graceful bearing even as she armed her pupils to smash the colour barrier with style.
“You are going to be good enough to perform for kings,” she announced to her all-star inaugural class, which included the Supremes; the Miracles and their lead singer, Smokey Robinson; Martha Reeves, of Martha and the Vandellas; and the pre-teen prodigy Stevie Wonder.
“Don’t forget, these were kids,” Powell said years later. “They came from the street and the projects. They were rude and crude-acting. They didn’t know how to look you in the eye or shake hands.”
She got a shy Marvin Gaye out of the habit of singing with his eyes closed. Powell firmly believed you should look at people when you’re singing to them. She told him, “You’re so handsome, I want to be sure you use every ounce of your body in walking.”
Martha Reeves told me that Powell taught her and the other singers to transcend what can be a self-focused environment, and to think about others.
“She taught us to keep our head erect and be aware of everything that was going on around us, as a way of respecting others and their personal space,” said Reeves.
Powell corrected the singers’ posture by having them balance books on their heads. They learned to exit a limousine with their knees together.
Her cardinal rules: don’t “protrude the buttocks”; never turn your back on the audience; respect your fans.
Of course, Powell’s influence also helped sell the music. Gordy wanted to produce records that would interest all people, regardless of race or class. His aim was timeless appeal. Consider Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson of the Supremes: chic young women in evening gowns (chosen by Powell) with a gentle, swaying way of moving and a subtle sensuality.
The outer trappings of grace can only go so far, however. Powell refined Ross’s performance and got her to rethink her ultra-long lashes. But she couldn’t ease the ungraceful tension in the singer’s shoulders, which tended to creep up protectively around her chin. That telltale bit of body language betrays the stresses of those glory days. The Supremes may have been the leading girl group of the 1960s, but their rise didn’t make for an easy life.
We have to look beyond the gowns and the posture drills for Powell’s deepest influence. Where she elicited true grace was in an entirely different arena: the mind. “What she taught us was class and self-worth,” wrote Martha Reeves in 2013.
Grace under pressure? Ernest Hemingway, who coined the phrase, didn’t know the half of it, not like Motown artists did at the height of the civil rights movement. Powell trained them to maintain their dignity in response to everyday abuses.
Wrote Reeves, “We were not protesters, we didn’t go marching or fighting; we had to break down barriers mentally and spiritually. She taught us how to be gracious if we went into a place and they refused to serve us. We would walk out politely and go find another place... And she was right. I survived. A lot of people at that time didn’t know how to overcome and persevere.”
This was a grace that mattered, especially to the Motown artists who had to find a way to move through the indignities of the times without damaging their label, their careers or their spirits.
For some, Powell’s lessons merely expanded upon an existing composure. Smokey Robinson, for instance, was smooth from the start. His plangent, high voice and relaxed presence made the girls scream; he was Motown’s equivalent of Elvis Presley, making disguised getaways after his shows with a coat thrown over his head so he wouldn’t be mobbed by fans. But his natural grace could also have a deeper effect.
In Montgomery, Alabama in 1963, several of Motown’s top groups were performing for a segregated audience as part of the Motortown Revue bus tour of one-night stands. At the end of the show, Martha and the Vandellas, the Marvelettes, Mary Wells, the Temptations, the Miracles, and 12-year-old Stevie Wonder, came together for the show’s grand finale, the Miracles’ hit song Mickey’s Monkey.
Joining the artists onstage were two men with baseball bats. They stood at the front, one on each side, to make sure the audience didn’t dance. “If anyone got up to dance they would get hit with those clubs,” Martha Reeves told me. This was customary in the South at that time, when police often kept white and black audience members separated by a rope.
Robinson and the Miracles were the stars of the show. Mickey’s Monkey was one of early Motown’s biggest successes. Its driving, hand-clapping beat had helped spread “the monkey” as a national dance craze. So when the time came for Robinson to launch into the infectiously upbeat closing tune, the tension in the arena was high. Everyone onstage knew the itch to dance was going to be irresistible, and their fans faced a beatdown. They had seen it happen before.
Robinson stepped up to the microphone and decided to try something a little different. He spoke first to the men with the bats.
“He told them, ‘We’re just going to dance and have a good time’,” Reeves recalled. “He told them, ‘This music is dance music, and you guys can move away.’ The whole situation was soothed over by Smokey Robinson’s words.
“And then it was like, ‘OK, man, if that’s what you think’,” said Reeves, “and they moved away just as easily as he said it.”
When Robinson started singing the familiar chorus, “Lum-di-lum-di-lai-ai”, the bat-wielding fellows “started dancing, too”, Reeves said. “And what happened was, the people had broke the barrier down. Everyone was hugging and kissing.
“It was the first time we could perform in the South that someone didn’t get hit on the head.”
For one night of grace in the Jim Crow South, a divided people came together and danced.
Washington Post
Sarah L Kaufman is the dance critic of The Washington Post.
This article was adapted from her new book, 'The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life'.