Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the producer Berry Gordy. He is Mr Motown,

founding the label, building a musical empire and making worldwide stars of Smoky Robinson. the could go on. His vision was to create a hit factory just like the car factories that

sustained his hometown of Detroit. He came up with the idea during the long dull

days he spent as a young man working on the Ford production line. Before that he tried

his hand at boxing and been a serving soldier in the Korean War. It was the

combination of his songwriting skills and entrepreneurial spirit that put

Motown music at the top of the charts and the centre of American culture.

During a pivotal moment in its civil rights history, indeed he even made an album with Dr Martin Luther King. He says

however when I started off I didn't know that I wanted to be a mogel or a big songwriter

or anything I just wanted to write songs, make some money and get some girls.

So welcome to Desert Island discs, Mr Berry Gordy. You are Motown, as I said there in the introduction.

Motown songs, of course, have been chosen by so many of our castaways throughout the decades.

Given your experience, given the breadth of your musical knowledge, given the songs that you've

written and the stars that you worked with, how on earth did you go about choosing your

eight discs for today's program? Not very easily.

So I went about thinking through the history of my life

and came up with the various songs that I thought

meant something to me in different ways than anything

else that I could have there.

...