Bob Babbitt was one of only two white musicians among the core of 13 session men in Motown’s legendary studio group The Funk Brothers.
He played on countless classics, from The Temptations Just My Imagination, Masterpiece and Ball Of Confusion to Freda Payne’s Band Of Gold, Gladys Knight’s Midnight Train To Georgia and Smokey Robinson’s Tears Of A Clown.
He also moonlighted from Motown to play on Edwin Starr’s War, which earned him (and the other naughty Funk Brothers) a fine from boss Berry Gordy Jr for recording for another label.
Perhaps the greatest example of his work on Stevie Wonder’s 1970 hit Signed, Sealed, Delivered, imprinting his own signature on a song that’s literally powered from start to finish by Babbitt’s basslines.
After joining the Funk Brothers in 1966, the Pittsburgh-born Babbitt moved back east to New York when Motown shifted some of its recording sessions to LA in the early Seventies (primarily for The Jackson 5), where they used the local session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew.
He went on to join one of soul music’s other legendary studio groups MFSB in Philadelphia, branching out from soul to work with Frank Sinatra, Barry Manilow and Alice Cooper and, in later years, Rod Stewart, Yoko Ono, Taj Mahal and Frank Black.
While most of Motown’s backing musicians were African American, and many originally from Detroit, The Funk Brothers included white guitarist Joe Messina and also used Dennis Coffey as well as Australian vibes man Jack Brokensha.
According to Paul Justman’s 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the session group “played on more number-one hits than The Beatles, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys combined.”
Unlike their Stax Records backing-band contemporaries Booker T. and the MGs in Memphis, until the doc’s release in 2002 the members of The Funk Brothers were not widely known.
Studio musicians were not credited by Motown until Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in 1971 and when they got their band name on records by founding member Earl Van Dyke, they were billed as the “Soul Brothers” – because Motown boss Berry Gordy Jr disliked the word “funk”.
In fact the word did not really come to be associated with soul – and largely limited to uptempo Southern soul – until the second half of the Sixties, and was not widely used until the Seventies.
The Funk Brothers broke up – or, more accurately, were dismissed by Gordy – in 1972, when he moved the entire Motown label to Los Angeles; some of the musicians learning of their sacking only from a notice on the studio door.
Babbitt died in 2012 from brain cancer; one of his last recordings was for Phil Collins’ Motown tribute album Going Back.