Wanda Young sang Motown hits with The Marvelettes

MICHIGAN • Wanda Young, a lead singer of The Marvelettes - a girl group whose 1961 song Please Mr Postman, recorded when they were teenagers, was Motown's first No. 1 hit - died on Dec 15 in Garden City, Michigan. She was 78.

Her daughter Meta Ventress said the cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The Marvelettes began recording in 1961, two years after Berry Gordy Jr founded Motown Records. They signed the same year as The Supremes and a year before Martha and the Vandellas, all-female groups who eventually overshadowed them at Motown.

Young and Gladys Horton shared lead singer duties.

Don't Mess With Bill, which rose to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1966, was one of several hits written by Smokey Robinson on which Young sang lead.

Horton was the lead singer on Please Mr Postman, Beechwood 4-5789 and other songs.

"Wanda had this little voice that was sexy to me, a little country kind of voice," Robinson was quoted as saying in music writer Fred Bronson's liner notes to the 1993 Marvelettes compilation, Deliver: The Singles (1961-1971). "I knew if I could get a song to her, it would be a smash."

Among the other Robinson songs that featured Young's voice were I'll Keep Holding On, a 1965 release that peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard chart; The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game, which rose to No. 13 in 1967; and My Baby Must Be A Magician, which hit No. 17 in 1968.

The Marvelettes, who recorded for Motown's Tamla label, released more than 20 singles that made the charts. The group, which started with five members and later became a quartet and eventually a trio, disbanded around 1970.

Wanda LaFaye Young was born on Aug 9, 1943, in Eloise, Michigan, and grew up in Inkster, about 32km west of Detroit. Her father, James, worked for Ford Motor Co, and her mother, Beatrice (Dawson) Young, was a housewife.

Young, whose early ambition was to be a paediatric nurse, joined The Marvelettes after one of the original members had to leave.

Horton had formed a quintet in 1960 with high-school classmates - Katherine Anderson, Georgeanna Tillman and Juanita Cowart - and a recent graduate, Georgia Dobbins.

The group competed in a talent show whose top three finishers were to receive an audition with Motown. The quintet did not win, but a teacher helped get them an audition anyway.

Motown executives were impressed, but said the group needed to return with original material. They did: Dobbins' friend William Garrett composed a blues song, which Dobbins rewrote and recast as a pop song, about a girl pining for mail from her distant boyfriend.

Please Mr Postman was a hit, but Dobbins left the group before it was recorded because her mother was ill and her father forbade her to be involved in the music business. Horton recruited Young.

Horton sang lead on the song. Three months after its release, it became a No. 1 hit.

Young's 12-year marriage to The Miracles' Bobby Rogers ended in 1975. They had two children, Robert III and Bobbae Rogers, who survive her, along with Ms Ventress, her daughter from another relationship; seven grandchildren; a great-grandson; four sisters and four brothers. Another daughter, Ms Miracle Rogers, was killed in 2015.

Ms Ventress said her mother - who lived off her royalties in the years after The Marvelettes broke up - was sometimes surprised at the longevity of her music.

"I told her constantly, 'All these people love you,'" Ms Ventress said in an interview. "And she'd say, 'Wow.'"

NYTIMES