Janie Bradford was a poetry-loving receptionist, not yet out of her teens, when she provided her boss, Berry Gordy Jr, with the lines that helped him complete a song called Money (That’s What I Want). Gordy, then in the early stages of establishing Motown Records and searching for what would become the label’s signature sound, was sitting at the piano in the summer of 1959 when Bradford, who had been listening to him at work, came up with a couplet that drove home the song’s message: “Your love gives me such a thrill / But your love don’t pay my bills.”
Money (That’s What I Want) was the first record to be made at Motown’s new Detroit studios, to be known as Hitsville USA. Sung by the 18-year-old Barrett Strong, it was released in the US in August 1959 and reached No 2 in the R&B charts and No 23 in the pop charts. In recognition of her contribution, Gordy added Bradford’s name to his own in the songwriting credits.
The song’s simple 12-bar blues structure, thumping rhythm and general air of rowdiness – and an amusingly realistic lyric far removed from what would become Motown’s standard odes to young love in all its guises and shadings – soon endeared it to young British beat groups, who noted its enlivening effect on their audiences. When the Beatles included it on their second album in 1963 and the Rolling Stones released it on an EP, the publishing royalties significantly augmented the young receptionist’s wages.
Bradford, who has died aged 87, was described by Smokey Robinson of the Miracles, Motown’s first million-selling act, as one of the company’s original six members of staff. She went on to co-write several more songs for Gordy’s artists, including Too Busy Thinking About My Baby, on which she shared the credits with Strong and the producer Norman Whitfield. First recorded by the Temptations in 1966, three years later it was picked as Marvin Gaye’s follow-up to his enormous hit with I Heard It Through the Grapevine.
Born in Charleston, Missouri, Janie moved to Detroit with her family as a child, part of the great migration of African Americans from the rural south to the industrial cities of the north and the midwest. At school she learned to love poetry, with a particular fondness for the work of Robert Frost. She was introduced to Gordy by Jackie Wilson, the singer whose big hit of 1957, Reet Petite, had been co-written by the aspiring music mogul.
According to Raynoma Singleton, Motown’s first vocal arranger, Gordy’s second wife and another of the original half-dozen Motown employees, Bradford had “a stupendous figure and a filthy mouth. Her mouth was so murderous that it could have had her arrested, but it also poured out sensational lyrics.”
While contributing to songs recorded by such now-forgotten early Motown acts as Freddie Gorman, Debbie Dean and the Satintones, Bradford became one of those who could turn her hand to many tasks. “In those early days,” Gordy recalled, “everybody did what needed to be done, and Janie was no exception. She was smart and determined.”
In 1961, when the decision was made to change the name of the newly signed Primettes, a young female vocal group from a Detroit housing project, it was Bradford who drew up a list including the name under which they became famous: the Supremes. During the long period when it seemed as though they would never make a commercial breakthrough, the B-side of a single called Let Me Go the Right Way featured a song titled Time Changes Things, which Bradford had co-written with Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier. It was Holland and Dozier, together with Brian’s brother Eddie, who wrote and produced the Supremes’ record-breaking run of 10 No 1s between 1964 and 1967.
Bradford also collaborated with Dozier and Brian Holland on Contract on Love, the 12-year-old Little Stevie Wonder’s second single release, in 1962. A ballad titled Don’t Compare Me With Her, co-written with Dozier and Eddie Holland and originally intended for the Supremes, became the B-side of Kim Weston’s Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me for a Little While), a hit in 1965.
When Gordy moved the company to Los Angeles in 1970, she went with them, given the job of liaising with and developing the songwriters contracted to Gordy’s publishing company, Jobete Music. But when she left, at the end of that decade, after 20 years, it was without a pension and amid some bitterness. “I never felt the door would close on me,” she told Singleton, a similarly disenchanted involuntary exile.
When she fell on hard times in the early 1980s, Diana Ross responded to a request to record one of her new songs, co-written with Freddie Gorman. Appearing on the B-side of Muscles, a top 10 hit, I Am Me brought in a significant sum. She went on to found the annual Heroes and Legends awards, honouring stars of the music industry and raising money to provide higher-education scholarships for young people.
She is survived by her husband, Wardean Hobbs, whom she married in 1971, a son, Lance, a daughter, Nicole, and two grandchildren.
• Janie Bradford Hobbs, songwriter and music industry executive, born 2 June 1939; died 21 August 2026
