Happy Birthday to Motown legend Martha Reeves, who turns 80 on Sunday (July 18th)!!! Martha Reeves & The Vandellas are best remembered for their string of 1960's hits including “Dancing In The Street,” “(Love Is Like A) Heatwave,” “Nowhere To Run,” and “Jimmy Mack.” In 2016, Reeves spoke about her emotions at hitting 75, telling The Detroit Free Press: “A lot of the Motown artists didn't reach the age of 75. So I feel like I'm a survivor. Life has been so good to me, and people have been so kind. We owe a lot of our fame to the acceptance of Detroiters — people who came to the 20 Grand and the Fox for three and four shows a day, stood in those lines, and let us rehearse on them until we could go to (national) theaters.”
From 2005 to 2009 Reeves held a seat on Detroit's city council. One of the many plans that she proposed for the city was for Detroit to erect statues for such local artists as Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, the Supremes, and her own group, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas. In 2006, the group's 1964 hit “Dancing In The Street” was included on the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry List.
Reeves credits the success of Motown as being one of the greatest collaborative efforts in rock n' roll: “It was like a collection of all of God's most talented here in Detroit. It took the Marvelettes making '(Please) Mr. Postman' to make people appreciate what Martha Reeves and the Vandellas did when we first sang 'Come And Get These Memories' and 'Heatwave.' Then it took our music with Holland-Dozier-Holland to make them understand how to produce a group like the Supremes and have ten Number Ones in a row (sic).”