Inside Motown’s Little Known Attempt to Launch a Country Label

T.G. Sheppard knows exactly how people at home may have felt when they were watching Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, the landmark 1983 TV special honoring one of the most enduring record companies ever. The singer was feeling the same way backstage at the Pasadena Civic Center in California, marveling at moments like Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” moonwalk, Marvin Gaye’s otherworldly “What’s Going On,” and the reunions of the Jackson 5, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and the Supremes.

He knows audiences were probably confused when comedian and host Richard Pryor appeared onstage to talk about that time Motown ventured into the “country and western field” and introduced Sheppard to sing “Devil in the Bottle,” a country hit from nearly a decade before. Everything about the performance, from the sorrowful honky-tonk song itself to Sheppard’s sparkly black jacket and brooding-Elvis delivery, must have made people think they’d accidentally switched channels. 

Once again, Sheppard could relate. “I felt like a wish out of water,” he says. “I knew why I was there; they wanted to show their diversity with the label. And I was honored to be there. But I never, ever felt like I belonged there, because it was very intimidating for me to be amongst all those people who were giants.”

By the time of that much-viewed TV special — 47 million people tuned in — Motown had already made its impact on the culture for its parade of hits and beloved acts. Before and since, the company successfully waded into Broadway (the acclaimed Temptations musical Ain’t Too Proud) and film (The Wiz, Lady Sings the Blues) and took a stab at labels devoted to jazz and rock. 

But Sheppard’s spotlight moment at Motown 25 was a reminder of one of the weirdest chapters in the legendary label’s history. First in the Sixties and again the following decade, Motown and its visionary founder, Berry Gordy Jr., tried to crack a market far from its Detroit roots: Nashville. “I remember him telling me he had a love of country music, and he felt it was going to be a huge area of music because country was on the rise,” says Sheppard. “He had the foresight to recognize that, and that’s what made him want to take that chance again with creating a country division. He felt very, very positive about country music and where it was going.”

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But in both cases, especially in the Seventies, Motown came up against forces it hadn’t anticipated. The situation isn’t quite the same as the obstacles that Beyoncé faced when she released Cowboy Carter earlier this year (namely, being accepted by Nashville’s cloistered Music Row) or the same as Shaboozey being shut out at November’s CMA Awards despite his “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” still resting at Number One on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart after six months. For one thing, all of the artists on Melodyland — the soon-to-be-contentious name of Motown’s country label — were white.

Still, the little-known story of Melodyland — involving a titillating novelty song, an early rock & roll star who tried to go country, and a resolute evangelist who wouldn’t back down — telegraphs country’s crossover popularity. Gordy, a titan of Black music, saw the appeal of the genre and leveraged his powerful label to take a shot at Nashville — only to come up with an empty beer glass.

FOR THE FUTURE HEAD OF MOTOWN, the dream of infiltrating Nashville dated back to the early Fifties. When he was stationed in Korea during his time in the U.S. Army, Gordy, then in his early twenties, carried around a transistor radio and heard “Mom and Dad’s Waltz,” a country hit at the time by honky-tonk master Lefty Frizzell. “I was on the frontline of the war, thousands of miles away from home, and I heard this song,” Gordy tells Rolling Stone. “It simply soothed my soul, reminding me of my love for my mom, dad and family, and the song just stayed with me.” Thanks to “Mom and Dad’s Waltz,” Berry had what he calls “a country favorite.”

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After launching his own Tamla and then Motown labels at the end of the Fifties, Gordy had a few major hits under the company’s belt, like the Miracles’ “Shop Around” and the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman.” But in 1961, before the Supremes, the Temptations, and other future legends fully came into their own, Motown was musically open to all types of music and founded labels devoted to gospel and jazz. Gordy started one particular offshoot, called Mel-o-dy, “for those R&B and soul artists I wasn’t sure where to place,” he says. After none of those artists and songs — like “Dearest One,” a lament about a soldier pining for his girlfriend at home, by future master Motown songwriter and producer Lamont Dozier — took off, Berry changed course. With the help of Dallas-based executive Al Klein, a country fan, he focused on making money via twang. “I turned the label over to the sales department,” Gordy confirms, “who helped me revamp it into a country label.” 

“Motown hadn’t fully become everything it was about to become, so in that sense, Mel-o-dy wasn’t usual,” says Adam White, former Billboard editor and Motown historian. “They were trying out different things.” Different was certainly the word for the 45s Mel-o-dy unleashed on the country market: Howard Crockett’s “The Big Wheel” was a takedown of a fat cat by a country act with a deep voice reminiscent of Johnny Cash, while former rocker Dorsey Burnette’s “Jimmy Brown” was the tale of a musical Paul Bunyon. As respectable as some of those records were, though, none made a dent. “It was good country,” says Richard Weize of the German label Bear Family, which has reissued some of the recordings. “But they were jumping at something they weren’t familiar with.” After one last Crockett single — ironically titled “The Great Titanic,” a loping ode to the doomed oceanliner — Mel-o-dy shuttered. 

But Gordy’s dreams didn’t end there. By 1974, Motown had moved to Los Angeles and was once again exploring other opportunities, right as country was having a moment thanks to crossover hits by Charlie Rich and country-by-association stars John Denver and Olivia Newton-John. This time, Gordy reached out to Ray Ruff, a Texas-based record man, and Mike Curb, known for running MGM Records and scoring a few hits with his unflappably wholesome pop group, the Mike Curb Congregation. (The Congregation also sang behind Sammy Davis Jr. on his hit version of “The Candy Man.”) “Berry said, ‘Look, Mike, I just want you to know that we are open for business here, whether it’s country [or other genres],” says Curb, who went on to become a power player in Nashville. That year, Motown announced its first all-country label, Melodyland. 

By coincidence, an indie record promoter named Bill Browder, who’d made a few pop records in the Sixties and was still itching to make it as a singer, cut a demo tape of “Devil in the Bottle,” a lachrymose ballad about a hard-drinking hot mess and the woman who remains devoted to him. “I was trying to get a deal with another label and was playing my song for this executive,” he says. “They turned me down, but as I walked out the door, a guy hollered at me and said, ‘I just heard that song through the wall. Man, that’s a hit.’” The employee turned out to be John Fisher, who was running the Nashville office of Melodyland in the same compound.

Fearful that he would be a one-hit wonder and still in need of his day job, Browder decided to adopt a stage name to conceal the fact that he was also a record promoter. As legend has it, he and his producer saw a pair of German shepherds outside a recording studio window. Thinking “shepherd” could work, they added T.G. — for “The German” or, possibly, “The Good” — and “T.G. Sheppard” was born. Melodyland issued Sheppard’s “Devil in the Bottle” in the summer of 1974 as the label’s first release and the song hit Number One on the country charts, finally giving Gordy the undeniable genre smash he’d been craving.

Motown’s conquest of country was finally coming into sight. Gordy, who was based in L.A., largely left the day-to-day operations to a handful of experienced pros, including then-Motown president Ewart Abner and executives Barney Ales, Herb Belkin, and Suzanne de Passe, then vice president of the company’s creative division. The label reunited with Dorsey Burnette and signed newer talents like singer-songwriter Terry Stafford (writer of the future George Strait classic “Amarillo by Morning”) and Ronnie Dove, a pop act with country leanings who recorded a swinging countrypolitan version of Bobby Darin’s “Things.”  

By way of Mike Curb, Motown also became the unlikely home of Pat Boone, the unabashedly wholesome (and religious) crooner and actor who’d become one of rock’s earliest stars thanks to his covers of songs by Little Richard and Fats Domino. Motown wasn’t interested in Boone’s gospel recordings, but country was another matter, and Boone was game. His first single for Melodyland, “Candy Lips,” was, for him, a slightly risqué romp. “I loved it,” he says of its vaguely naughty lyrics. “I didn’t want to cross over the line, and, you know, become a different person. But I mean, gosh, I had four daughters by the time I was 23, so I was a sexual entity, of course.” The song wasn’t a hit, but Boone was now a cowboy-hat-wearing country act. 

Another Curb endorsement was Jud Strunk, a folk-country singer and sometime actor (on the variety show Laugh-in) who released “The Biggest Parakeets in Town” in 1975, a double-entendre novelty ditty about a woman with — wink, wink — noticeable pet birds. (“And every night, when she gets in bed/She puts each one on a pillow,” he sang as a live audience on the recording yucked it up.) Joel Strunk, one of Strunk’s children, remembers his father emerging from his office at his farmhouse in Maine and asking his son, “You know what a bullet is?” 

“I said, ‘No, Dad,’” the younger Strunk recalls. “And he goes, ‘It’s when a song rises at a certain rate on the chart.’” Melodyland had another hit single in the making — but no one knew that it would also mark the beginning of the label’s end. 

By the middle of 1975, Melodyland appeared to be in the honky-tonk business, and Gordy himself was ecstatic. “When the sales department told me, ‘T.G. Sheppard is Number One!’ I was thrilled,” Gordy says. “Since it was our first Number One on the country chart, I said, ‘Great. Wonderful. You got a follow-up?’” That record turned out to be “Motels and Memories,” a tale of adultery that also settled into the top slot. “I could hardly believe it,” Gordy says. “We were lucky enough to have not one, but two records go to Number One on the Billboard country chart. That validated my thoughts that we are all more the same than different, and people love all kinds of music if it is good, no matter who puts it out.”

The label soon moved to a larger space in Nashville. “On the top floor of a building,” Sheppard recalls. “I remember having to walk up a long flight of stairs on the outside just to get to the offices.” To ingratiate himself into the community, John Fisher took part in the Nashville Pickers Celebrity Baseball Team, a touring sports outfit that included local record executives and artists like Roy Clark, Tanya Tucker, and Mickey Gilley. On the label’s first anniversary, in October 1975, Gordy and his team threw a one-year bash at the Palomino club in North Hollywood, with Sheppard performing.

But the Palomino party would turn out to be the last for Melodyland.

ANYONE WHO LIVED IN THE VICINITY of Anaheim, California, knew Melodyland not as the name of a record label but as an in-the-round theater where the Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel, Little Richard, Jefferson Airplane, and others all played in the mid-Sixties. By 1969, the venue had fallen on hard times and was purchased for $1.2 million by the nearby Christian Center Church in a bankruptcy auction, becoming home to the Melodyland Christian Center. Instead of rock & roll, the structure, a large concrete tent, now hosted multiple services each Sunday for 28 different denominations. Melodyland — the church — also began releasing born-again records on its own label and had a syndicated show on the Christian Broadcasting Network; the theater also hosted services by its founder, the Oklahoma-born pastor Ralph A. Wilkerson.

By the early Seventies, a new generation of television-friendly evangelists — Jimmy Swaggart and Robert Schuller, among them — had risen, and Wilkerson, with his telegenic looks and fiery sermons, fit the mold. “I’m going to compare him to Donald Trump,” says Boone, who was friendly with Wilkerson. “Sandy hair, tall and well built, very energetic. An upbeat, cheerful, kind of a guy.” 

Wilkerson and his church were, to say the least, unconventional. In 1974, the same year Motown’s Melodyland Records opened shop, Wilkerson claimed he’d been healed of a slipped disc through Bible studies, prayer, and speaking in tongues. Wilkerson’s congregation also ran a 24-hour hotline for those dealing with substance abuse or in need of a comforting prayer — sometimes, Melodyland would also deal with what Michael Bussee, a former volunteer, calls “Christian guys who were mainly in the closet.” “We thought of ourselves more as a support group,” he says, “sort of like AA to overcome homosexuality and maybe, through prayer, we’d become straight.” The process would later be known as “conversion therapy.” “It was all sensationalism and hucksterism, really,” says Bussee, who would later come out, divorce his wife, and leave the church. “But people sincerely believed it.”

When the Melodyland Christian Center realized that Motown had a new label with the same name, a lawyer for the church demanded that Gordy’s company stop using the moniker, contending that the name “Melodyland” had been purchased with the building in 1969. But Motown’s legal head refused to comply, insisting that Motown had registered the name in August 1975. With that, the church filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office asking for Motown’s use of Melodyland to be canceled and revoked. 

It wasn’t merely the name that Wilkerson wanted to protect. The church was worried it would be “damaged,” according to reports at the time, by the general public associating the church with drinking songs like “Devil in the Bottle” and “Tryin’ to Beat the Morning Home” and the bawdy “The Biggest Parakeets in Town.” (The church also claimed “Tryin’ to Beat the Morning Home” was about adultery, which it wasn’t.) 

Curb, who was still working with Gordy, didn’t see such content as a problem. “If you take those things out of country music, you won’t have any country songs,” he says. But a lawyer for the church claimed that Motown’s country releases “were diametrically opposed to the recordings, publications and community activities” associated with the Melodyland church. “Ralph felt that the very name of his church, his congregation, was possibly being maligned inappropriately because somebody else was using that name, which he had first,” Boone says. “He wanted to protect that name.” (Ironically, Boone was starring in a production of West Side Story at Melodyland, which still continued as a performance venue, when the feud began.)

Ultimately, in a blow to one of the giants of pop, the government sided with the church over Motown. A review by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board determined that the Melodyland Christian Center had registered its trademark first, and Motown’s use of the name would have to cease as of December 1976. Motown had no choice but to comply. “The Melodyland church said we could not continue to use that name, because they already had a record label called Melodyland,” Gordy says. 

To find a new name, Motown resorted to a contest, asking radio station executives around the country to submit ideas. At a ceremony at Nudie’s in Hollywood, the North Hollywood boutique that specialized in embroidered cowboy suits, a Motown executive stuck his hand into a hat with all the ballots and emerged with one reading “Hitsville.” If that sounded familiar, it was: Hitsville was the unofficial name given to Motown’s first home, a Detroit house turned into an office and studio. “Berry didn’t blame anyone [for the trademark debacle],” says Curb, “but he finally just said, ‘Enough.’ He had used Hitsville; that’s what they used to call Motown back in the day.” The contest winner, a radio exec from Kansas, was given a free Western hat from Nudie’s and tickets to a Sheppard concert. 

Unfortunately for Motown, what looked like a fresh start turned into an accelerated coda. Hitsville rushed out a bunch of music that had been awaiting release while the name issue was being worked out. Those included a Sheppard cover of Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” and two country albums by Boone, with calculated-for-radio numbers like “Texas Woman,” “Indiana Girl,” and “Whatever Happened to the Good Old Honky Tonk.”

But none of those releases, or ones by other artists, like a country remake of Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You,” matched the early sales promise of “Devil in the Bottle.” As Gordy recalls, “Unfortunately for us, the new country product on Hitsville did not prove to be hits.” As White chronicled in his blog post on the history of the label, Gordy shuffled around some of his executives and canned others. Strunk’s “The Biggest Parakeets in Town” was another casualty and not the novelty hit Motown had hoped for. Says Joel Strunk, “It was absolutely shot down by the religious right.”

Finally, in 1977, Hitsville — and Motown’s foray into the Nashville scene — came to an abrupt end. “I got a call one day that the label was folding,” Sheppard recalls. “I felt they were really onto something, and I don’t really understand why they decided to get out of country. It was really starting to pay off for them.” Boone was similarly confused. Curb says that his run for lieutenant governor of California during this time may also have played a role in the label’s demise, since the campaign limited his involvement with Hitsville.

The name debacle was bad enough, but the label’s financial bottom line wasn’t pretty, either. In the decades before country acts moved millions of records, Motown, which was accustomed to huge sales, had to deal with a business that was smaller than it had anticipated. “The volume wasn’t there,” says White, who recalls an interview with Gordon Prince, the Motown promo man who died in 2019. “He reminded me that if you went Top 10 on the country charts, you’d sell 40,000 to 50,000 singles. Well, Motown was used to selling millions. The scale of success was not what they had been used to. T.G. Sheppard was a relatively big star, but it was pretty small potatoes as far as Motown was concerned.”

Was it also the result of a culture clash, akin to what Beyoncé and Shaboozey went through this year? Sheppard says Motown’s outsider status in Nashville may have played a role. “In this day and age, country is almost pop music,” he says. “But back then, it was a little different. Because Motown was such a power base with R&B and pop music, people in country music might have had a problem accepting the fact that they were moving into country: ‘Hey, wait a minute here, this is our little thing we got going here.’ I never heard that, but I’m pretty sure there were some people in Nashville who might have felt that way.”

The Melodyland Christian Center suffered its own ignominious fate. By the time Hitsville had folded, the church had become a multi-tentacled house of God, raking in millions from a theology school, TV network, a college, daycare center, and other ancillary businesses. But from then and into the Nineties, Melodyland fell into serious debt and was on the verge of bankruptcy at least twice, in part due to overexpansion, overspending, and what Wilkerson called “inefficiency in accounting methods.” In 2003, the building was torn down and replaced with the Anaheim GardenWalk, an outdoor mall; Wilkerson died in 2018. 

As for Melodyland Records, the label remains an odd but important footnote to Motown and country history 50 years later. None of its albums and singles are available on streaming services, and there’s no mention of Melodyland on a company timeline on Motown’s official website. But every so often, Gordy’s ill-fated shot at country music makes a surprise encore. Joel Strunk recalls watching a Motown TV special and hearing the names of every artist on the label recited by an announcer. “He said my father’s name,” Strunk says. “I’m like, ‘That’s my father on this huge anniversary show of Motown, and they still recognized him.’”