[youtube]https://youtu.be/9KhbM2mqhCQ[/youtube]
Motown Records had a few regular session bass players in their stable (such as Wilton Felder, heard prominently on the studio recording of I Want You Back by the Jackson 5), but the one you heard often but never knew his name was James Jamerson. Why? Because for anything Motown released prior to 1971, session players weren’t credited.
Of course, James is well-known today as a very influential player because he has quite the impressive résumé, as he’s played for Stevie Wonder, The Miracles, The Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas (as heard above), Marvin Gaye and the list goes on and on.
What’s Goin’ On by Marvin Gaye (released May 1971) is one of the more interesting tracks James played on, because Marvin actually had to hunt down Jamerson and almost drag him into the studio just to get the track done. It’s a good thing Marvin did that because the end result was an amazing song that wouldn’t have been the same without James’s bass mastery.
A lot of bass players feel that the later 1970s was the pinnacle of all bass playing. For those that think that way, I’d say to look back a decade earlier, because there was some unbelievably fantastic bass lines heard in the popular songs of the 1960s and very-early 1970s. And a lot of that came straight from Motown. It was a shame we didn’t know their names until the 1970s came around, but the recordings speak for themselves and still influence many players to this day.
100% agree.
Those Motown lines were killer and it’s a shame they weren’t credited. A lot of the time it was tough to even hear the bass lines on those old recordings as well