Ivy Jo Hunter was born in Detroit in 1940. He learned to play trumpet and baritone sax and played in the Detroit All City Orchestra. He was also a singer in various amateur vocal groups. He enrolled at Cass Tech High School in the city, where several of the Motown staff members also studied, but rather than music, he chose commercial art, following his mother’s wishes. Nevertheless, it was music that really interested him and he became proficient on keyboards too. After his military service, he started to sing in some well-known Detroit clubs, while working at an electrical company to earn a living. This is how he met Hank Cosby, one of Motown’s longest -serving staff members, who introduced him to Mickey Stevenson. In 1963, he was signed up at Motown, as a singer, songwriter, and producer. He had actually already had a Motown credit, as he had co-written a song “Claudia” with Clarence Paul and Mickey Stevenson (credited as Williams, maybe to avoid problems?), which the Contours had included on their 1962 album “Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)”.
Ivy Jo Hunter
Photo: VIP Promotional Shot (Wikimedia Commons)
He was sufficiently formally trained to arrange music, and soon became a regular in Studio A, often playing keyboards. He wrote a good number of songs, sometimes alone but often in collaboration. Stevenson became his regular partner and Hunter has described the amicable arrangement that they had, whereby both their names would be credited on a lot of Hunter’s compositions, even when Stevenson had contributed little or nothing to the songs. In return, Hunter’s name was credited on some of Stevenson’s songs.
From 1964, Stevenson and Hunter frequently worked together as the production team for many of the Motown roster, including Kim Weston, the Four Tops, the Contours, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, Martha & the Vandellas, the Isley Brothers and Gladys Knight & the Pips.
Like Norman Whitfield, Hunter wasn’t afraid of experimenting, trying to find new way to develop Motown’s artists. In 2019, he expressed his views very clearly: “If I got a chance to work with an artist, I was not looking for ‘the Motown Sound’. I took that artist somewhere else. You weren’t going to get a ‘My Guy’ out of me.” It is possible that this approach was interpreted as challenging the status quo! When Stevenson left, Hunter continued to bring good songs and dramatic production values to Studio A, but he felt less secure. Nearly all the managers and session men had been there longer than him, and it wasn’t his style to push himself to the front.
It was also a serious disappointment for Hunter that Motown failed to consider him as an artist. He often recorded his own songs in Studio A to create demos for the other artists to listen to when they and their producers were looking for new material. But, despite this ready source of evidence that he was a good singer, it wasn’t until 1970 that he was able to release a single on the VIP label. Ironically, some of those demo tracks were eventually released, credited simply to Ivy Jo, on the 2019 album “Motown Unreleased 1969”.
When Motown began transferring its operations to Los Angeles, Hunter left and continued working in Detroit with other labels. His best-known song, “Hold On (To Your Dream)”, was written with Vernon Bullock around 1978 and recorded by Wee Gee.
His greatest legacy is the collection of songs that he left when he died in October 2022 at the age of eighty-two. They include “Truly Yours” (The Spinners), “You” (Marvin Gaye), “Sorry is a Sorry Word” (The Temptations), “Behind A Painted Smile” (The Isley Brothers), “Ask The Lonely” (The Four Tops), “The Stranger” (Gladys Knight & the Pips), and the biggest of his hits “Dancing In The Street” (Martha & the Vandellas). Having taught Rosalind Ashford and Betty Kelly their backing vocals, Hunter joined them for the recording session.
The songs that he wrote were often unusual, requiring time to appreciate fully. Hunter’s lyrics were also memorable but rarely repeated. He made it all sound easy: “I never did the same song twice. I just did what came naturally. I’d studied poetry and poetic meter and I knew how to work vocabulary and create rhymes to tell the story.”
Hunter should be much better known, given his contribution to Motown. One reason why he isn’t may well lie in his decision to change his professional name to Ivy Jo Hunter. (He was given the name George Ivy Jo Hunter). The new name created two sources of confusion. The first was with Blues musician Ivory Jo Hunter, who was older and from Texas. The second, more of a problem, was with Joe Hunter, the leader of Motown’s original session band. Worse still, Ivy Jo Hunter was often credited as Ivy Hunter or Ivy Jo, which led some listeners to think he was a she! But he was just “another quiet Motown hero” (The Complete Motown Singles Vol 10).
