Diana Ross

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• Top 6 Motown Artists of All Time

  Currently #4 · score 0

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• The Temptations

  The Temptations became one of Motown's most commercially successful and longest-lasting vocal groups, and their choreographed dance routines, developed with in-house Motown choreographer Cholly Atkins, established a visual performance standard that influenced nearly every subsequent Motown vocal group. Their 1972 song "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," incorporating extended instrumental passages and darker, more socially conscious lyrical content, reflected the group's successful evolution beyond Motown's earlier, more straightforwardly romantic pop-soul formula into more musically ambitious "psychedelic soul" territory. The group's numerous lineup changes across more than six decades of continuous activity, with different singers rotating through the group while it maintained its name and brand identity, gave The Temptations one of the most complex and enduring group histories in American vocal group music. Their combination of technically precise vocal harmonies, elaborate choreography, and their successful musical evolution across changing eras has made The Temptations one of the most commercially and artistically significant vocal groups in Motown's entire history.

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• Smokey Robinson & the Miracles

  Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' 1960 song "Shop Around" became Motown's first million-selling hit, establishing the commercial template that helped build the label into a major recording industry force during its earliest years of operation. Beyond his own recordings, Robinson served as a Motown vice president and one of the label's most significant staff songwriters and producers, writing hits for numerous other Motown artists and playing a foundational role in shaping the label's broader musical direction during its 1960s golden era. His smooth, falsetto-inflected vocal style and his sophisticated, often poetically constructed lyrics earned him direct praise from Bob Dylan, who reportedly called Robinson "America's greatest living poet," an unusual crossover endorsement from outside the soul and R&B tradition. His combination of foundational commercial success as a performer and his significant behind-the-scenes songwriting and executive role has made Robinson one of the most historically important figures in Motown's entire institutional history, both as an artist and as a label architect.

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• The Four Tops

  The Four Tops maintained the same four original members for more than four decades, an extraordinary level of lineup stability rare among vocal groups of any era, until the group's first lineup change following a member's death in 1997. Their collaboration with Motown's celebrated Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting and production team produced a string of major hits throughout the mid-1960s, including "I Can't Help Myself" and "Reach Out I'll Be There," reflecting one of Motown's most productive artist-producer partnerships. Lead singer Levi Stubbs's powerful, emotionally intense vocal delivery distinguished The Four Tops from some smoother-voiced Motown vocal group contemporaries, giving their recordings a more urgent, dramatic quality within the label's broader polished pop-soul sound. The Four Tops' combination of remarkable lineup stability and their productive Holland-Dozier-Holland collaboration has made them one of the most commercially successful and historically consistent vocal groups in Motown's history.

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• Martha Reeves and the Vandellas

  Martha Reeves and the Vandellas' 1964 song "Dancing in the Street" became one of the most enduringly popular Motown recordings, and the song was later adopted by some civil rights and social justice movements as an anthem, an interpretation Reeves has stated wasn't the song's original intended meaning but one she came to embrace. Reeves's powerful, gospel-influenced vocal delivery gave the Vandellas a rawer, more urgent energy than some of Motown's smoother, more polished vocal group contemporaries, reflecting a distinct stylistic niche within the label's broader roster. The group's sustained commercial success throughout the mid-1960s established them as one of Motown's most significant female vocal groups, competing directly with The Supremes for chart prominence during the label's peak commercial era. Reeves's later career as an elected member of the Detroit City Council extended her public influence directly into local civic leadership, connecting her Motown-era fame to sustained civic engagement in the city where the label originated.

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• Gladys Knight & the Pips

  Gladys Knight & the Pips' original 1967 recording of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" became a major hit for the group before Marvin Gaye's own later version of the same song, produced with a different, more atmospheric arrangement, became the more commercially dominant and historically remembered rendition. Knight's powerful, emotionally rich vocal delivery, combined with the Pips' tightly choreographed backing vocals and dance routines, made the group one of Motown's most polished and commercially reliable acts throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. The group's eventual departure from Motown for Buddah Records in 1973 led to some of their biggest commercial hits, including "Midnight Train to Georgia," reflecting that not every major Motown-era act's greatest commercial success necessarily occurred while signed directly to the label itself. Their combination of sustained vocal group excellence at Motown and their subsequent continued major commercial success afterward has made Gladys Knight & the Pips one of the most enduringly significant vocal groups associated with the broader Motown musical era.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.