‘Dreamgirls’ shines spotlight on girl groups

updated 1:01 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2006

DETROIT - Set in the 1960s and ‘70s, “Dreamgirls” doesn’t profess to be a literal history of Motown or any other music scene from the past.

But the film, which is loosely based on Detroit chart-toppers the Supremes, does examine the issues that confronted many girl groups over the years. In this case: a calculating manager, relentless ambitions and ego-driven clashes among the artists.

Motown Hall of Famer Martha Reeves says she’s glad that the film, which opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles and Dec. 25 across the country, is shining a spotlight on the sound, glamour and elegance of girl groups.

“Being a performer, I could identify with the development of the talent, our personalities and opinions and how judgments are decreed,” said the 65-year-old former leader of Martha and the Vandellas, whose hits included “Dancing in the Street” and “Heat Wave.” “But I couldn’t say there was anything [in the film] like my experience in Motown.”

Inspired by the Supremes
The film, adapted from the 1981 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name, chronicles a fictional three-piece girl group known as the Dreamettes. Its two main members — Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) and Effie White (Jennifer Hudson) — were inspired by the Supremes’ Diana Ross and Florence Ballard, respectively.

The three, who are rounded out by Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose), are discovered by manager Curtis Taylor Jr. (Jamie Foxx) and offered a job as backup singers for hit-maker James “Thunder” Early, played by Eddie Murphy.

Taylor eventually establishes the trio as the stand-alone act The Dreams and begins shaping the women’s look and sound, a la Motown. As Berry Gordy did for Ross, Taylor grooms Jones for the spotlight, while the less photogenic Effie is pushed out. (Ballard left the group in 1967, ended up on welfare and died in 1976.)

In reality, the soundtrack to the film has more in common with show tunes than the signature Motown or Phil Spector-produced “wall of sound” style that characterized so many girl-group artists.

Charles Sykes, an Indiana University professor who teaches a class on the history of the Motown music movement, said girl groups rode a wave of popular music that targeted an emerging market of music-hungry teenagers. He said most of Motown’s girl groups didn’t necessarily stand apart from the label’s overall talent roster until the Supremes began to emerge as superstars in 1964-65 with hits such as “Baby Love” and “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

“The girl-group tradition kind of started around the mid-’50s, part of the rock ’n’ roll era, and then the girl groups really started to wane in the ’60s,” he said. “Motown was an exception in that sense.”

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Lyrically, female performers of the era presented certain contradictions, said music journalist Donna Gaines, who contributed the chapter “Girl Groups: A Ballad of Codependency” for the “Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock.”

On the one hand, she said, many of the era’s girl groups performed songs written by men on topics that largely reinforced societal gender roles. But groups like the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”) and the Ronettes (“Be My Baby”) presented more defiant music.

“It was music made by teenagers for teenagers, and on the surface it was a lot about your role assignment as a wife and a good woman, and you’re supposed to be there for the guy,” Gaines said. “But it also allowed you to pull away from the family and the community and make your own choices for yourself.”

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