In one corner of my rich inner fantasy world, I get to sing and dance in the street with Martha and the Vandellas. The legendary Motown girl group topped the charts in the early 1960s with a string of bouncy hits, including “(Love is Like a) Heat Wave” (1963),“Nowhere to Run” (1965) and “Dancing in the Street” (1964), which has become one of the most played singles of all time.

My favourite photo, from a 1965 television appearance, shows them singing and snapping their fingers while perched on the back of a Mustang at a Ford assembly plant.

But when my dream finally comes true and I meet Martha Reeves, the group’s lead singer, we are, rather less glamorously, walking briskly through an office building, having a policy-wonkish discussion about public finance and the credit crunch.

Since 2005, Reeves has been a Detroit city councilwoman and we are heading to her favourite Italian restaurant, located in the sprawling 1970s-built Renaissance Center complex, which also houses General Motors’ headquarters.

Annie Leibovitz photographed Reeves last year for Vanity Fair for a piece on Motown. In that photo, Reeves is sporting a fur coat and windswept hair, dancing on a Detroit street. Today she is dressed in a tailored red cardigan, a black leather skirt, and stern black-rimmed glasses.

She has just come from a closed council meeting – Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, has downgraded Detroit’s credit rating to sub-investment-grade or “junk” status, and the meeting was to examine options. She insists that “it’s not a bad time for Detroit – we’re business as usual. We made some bad decisions and there’s an economic crisis around the world.”

As we walk, Reeves is recognised by many Detroiters, either from politics or her glory years at Berry Gordy’s recording studio. The Motown label nurtured some of pop’s most prodigious talents, including the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Michael Jackson. It also broke racial barriers by introducing millions of white Americans to black music.

“Happy 50th!” a maintenance man shouts at Reeves. She laughs and stops to talk. Reeves is 67 but Motown is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gordy starting (with an $800 loan) what was to become one of America’s biggest black-owned businesses.

We arrive at Andiamo restaurant, an upscale Italian that serves GM executives and other well-heeled Detroiters. Reeves seems annoyed when our waitress does not recognise her. She asks her to seat us in a booth rather than her usual windowside table overlooking the frozen Detroit river so, she says, she can concentrate on our conversation.

Our talk turns to Barack Obama (his image is plastered on magazine covers and photos, including one taken with Reeves, posted on an easel in her office). After praising the new president’s intelligence and lucidity, she turns rather more informal: “Plus, he’s good-looking – he reminds me of Marvin Gaye.” I realise I am having lunch with someone who has met them both.

SOUL SURVIVORS

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on Motown’s ‘family’ reunions

Members of the Motown “family”, as the record label’s performers like to call themselves, are reuniting this summer to celebrate Motown’s 50th anniversary. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas feature with the likes of the Commodores and Mary Wilson of the Supremes in the line-up – though the Vandellas on stage will not be the originals.

Reeve’s current backing singers are her sisters Lois and Delphine, replacements for the childhood friends she recruited in 1962, Rosalind Ashford and Annette Beard. The changing personnel underlines Reeves’ iron grip on the group. Unlike the Supremes, who shared lead vocals until Motown supremo Berry Gordy insisted Diana Ross act as main vocalist, Martha and the Vandellas were unquestionably led by Reeves. In 1967, her identity was stamped even more forcibly on the group with its renaming as “Martha Reeves and the Vandellas”.

In her youth the tall, slim singer towered over her backing singers. That was no longer the case when I saw her play with Lois and Delphine in London in 2007, though Reeves, like an ageing soul Cleopatra, presented a picture of defiant glamour in a figure-hugging gold dress and gold stilettos. She maintained her ownership of classics such as “Dancing in the Street” and “(Love is Like a) Heat Wave” with evident pride and a sharp voice that glinted like a sabre, although the track for which she seemed to reserve most vigour was the obscure “Watch Your Back” from a widely ignored solo album released in 2004.

“Watch Your Back” – the sentiment could function as Reeves’ Motown epitaph. As the 1960s progressed the company’s energies increasingly went into promoting the Supremes as its chief girl group, relegating the Vandellas to the status of also-rans. Gordy’s pragmatic reasoning was that the smoother-sounding Supremes were more likely to appeal to white audiences but Reeves felt betrayed. The Vandellas broke up in 1972, the year Motown moved to Los Angeles, and Reeves parted ways with the company soon after.

Motown’s abandonment of Detroit lays bare the unsentimental business philosophy at its heart. Motown’s musicians were family in that they shared similar backgrounds in Detroit’s black neighbourhoods but their autocratic boss Gordy treated them as employees. “Family” ultimately played second-fiddle to sales. No wonder Reeves, one of Motown’s least pliable stars, chooses to sing with real blood relations nowadays.

The Legends of Motown tour begins in the UK on June 23

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic

We order a plate of mixed appetisers to share, some pasta and two glasses of Riesling. The day before our meeting Reeves had returned from a concert in Berlin – her city council job is full-time but she fits in musical gigs during holiday recesses. She digs about in her bag and brings out an article from USA Today that she read on the flight from Germany. It mentions and quotes her, among other artists, but the accompanying picture is of Diana Ross and the Supremes.

Some Motown historians suggest that Gordy’s decision to devote writers and resources to the Supremes was a sore point with Reeves. I seize the moment to ask her whether she was jealous of the Supremes getting all that attention. “I’m not jealous of anything or anybody – we hold our own,” she says firmly.

“They were jealous of us, and they took our writers,” she says. “Then they had 10 number ones in a row, so I guess they showed us!” She laughs.

Reeves says the reports of rivalry were sparked by the 2006 film of the musical Dreamgirls. This was a fictionalised account of a Supremes-type group, and it angered many Motown veterans, including Gordy, for taking big liberties with their story. Reeves describes the film as “a farce”.

The wine arrives and we clink glasses to toast Motown’s 50th. She tells me that on early Motown tours, she shared hotel rooms with the Supremes’ Mary Wilson. “That’s why she and I are so tight today,” she says. Gordy split up the groups in the hotels to encourage cohesion among the label’s artists. “Our competition was the Crystals, the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, the Angels ... ” she says, naming groups from other labels.

Reeves was born in 1941 in Eufaula, Alabama, the third of 11 children, and was brought as a baby to Detroit. Like many of their generation, Reeves’ parents fled the south in search of a better life. She began her public singing career aged three, with a gospel song in a talent contest at her grandfather’s church.

As a teenager, she won a talent contest and was asked by William “Mickey” Stevenson, a producer and songwriter for Hitsville USA, as Motown’s studio was known, to audition.

Reeves showed up the next morning – the wrong day for an audition – but Stevenson asked her to mind his office while he was out. Reeves, who had taken secretarial courses in school, made herself useful by answering the phone and taking dictation for the songwriters who were crammed into a small residential house on West Grand Boulevard where creative talents clashed and tensions sometimes flared.

“I kind of took over because I had to,” she says. “There was an emergency – people were threatening to fight, to shoot.” A large appetiser plate arrives and Reeves says a few words of grace before we eat. In the 1960s, she drifted away from religion but re-embraced it in 1977 while living in Los Angeles. (“I was just another unemployed entertainer,” she says. “The town is full of them.”)

Reeves came to Gordy’s attention when singing back-up with a group called the Del-Phis for Marvin Gaye and other artists. She was asked to do a demo record. “I didn’t just sing it, I put my heart into it,” she says, helping herself to calamari.

Gordy gave the group a contract and Reeves, as lead singer, had 15 minutes to make up a name. Reeves, who lived near Van Dyke street on Detroit’s east side and worshipped the singer Della Reese, came up with the Vandellas.

The group had their first million-seller in “Heat Wave,” which climbed the charts thanks to a TV broadcaster who introduced the weather forecast with it.

The atmosphere in Hitsville USA, Reeves recalls, was a mixture of creative chaos and strict discipline imposed by Gordy’s blueprint for nurturing artists. “It was a beehive of talented people making wonderful music,” she says.

As the 1960s ended, however, the Vandellas were eclipsed by other Motown groups and in 1972 Gordy decided to move the label to Los Angeles. There was anger in Detroit over Motown’s move to the coast. “It took them time to get over it,” Reeves says. “The city was in an uproar when they decided to leave.”

Reeves, who had a four-month-old son at the time, says she wasn’t even told they were moving until the office had packed up. “I wasn’t asked to go,” she says flatly. “My contract expired.”

Instead, she recorded as a solo act before reuniting with the original Vandellas in 1989. Reeves has cycled through several versions of the group since and today is backed up by her sisters Lois and Delphine. So you sing with them? I ask. “They sing with me,” Reeves corrects.

I ask which contemporary musicians she likes. “It’s hard to say,” she says. A tense silence follows before I ask whether she likes Beyoncé. “Who?” she asks archly. She grimaces when I mention Eminem, another Detroiter. “You have little girls around now who are dancing with their bellies, with a lot of suggestive lyrics Motown would never have,” she says. “It seems to sell.” At Motown, she says, “we had a quality control department, and our lyrics were under scrutiny. Berry would say, ‘I don’t like that, go change it’.”

Her grandson has filled her iPod with new music, she says. “I rejected the ones that don’t have any musicians in them – they just have beatboxes and some noises.” She says she likes Mahalia Jackson and other gospel singers.

She sweetly offers me half of the last prawn on the plate we are sharing, which she cuts in half. I am feeling very full already and the house speciality of pasta with seafood is still to come.

As two enormous plates arrive, Reeves tells me about her 38-year-old son, who works for Chrysler, the Detroit carmaker that is now surviving on a $4bn emergency government loan.

We are back to discussing Detroit’s dire current state, so I raise a delicate point: Reeves is a senior official in one of America’s worst-run cities. Its former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, the erstwhile “hip-hop mayor”, has recently served a 120-day jail term for lying to police investigating his administration’s abuse of power. Reeves was elected to city council after some of the worst cases of reported government malfeasance but before Kilpatrick resigned.

When I mentioned I was interviewing Reeves to Detroiters less besotted than myself with Motown music, several were scathing about city government. Some were rude about her. I ask about the ratings downgrade. “If you don’t have trouble and problems, what would you need a city council for?” she asks in return.

She tells me about some of her work as councillor, including one tale of intervening in a dispute at a high school where Arab-American and black children were fighting.

Fewer than half of Detroit’s high-school students graduate, and some schools lack light bulbs and toilet paper. I ask Reeves why they are so bad.

“It’s a social thing – the broader culture,” Reeves says, returning to a theme touched on in our talk about music. “It’s a mess, not only in Detroit,” she says. “Parents have to teach their kids respect.”

Will having a new, more inspiring, president make Americans change?

“I know we will because we’ll have someone to look up to,” Reeves says. “He’s got to help the middle class and the poor people – make a little more of an even distribution in our economy.”

Our pasta unfinished, we both skip dessert. Reeves asks for take-away containers.

Reeves’s favourite waiter approaches and the talk turns to lighter fare such as cosmetic surgery, including one older R&B diva who, she says laughingly, “can’t stop smiling”. I get up, feeling uplifted to have met Reeves but heavier from the large meal, and walk the councillor back to her office.

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Andiamo Riverfront
400 Renaissance Center,Suite A-403, Detroit, Michigan

Fried calamari x1 $8.95
Grilled portobello
mushrooms x1 $8.95
Shrimp appetiser x1 $12.95
Seafood with angel hair pasta x2 $65.90
San Pellegrino x1 $4.95
Karl Erbes Riesling x2 $24.00

Total (inc. service) $153.24