Janie Bradford, a songwriter who, as a jill-of-all-trades in the earliest days of Motown Records, worked the front desk, arranged contracts and, most notably, helped write the company’s first big hit, “Money (That’s What I Want),” with the label’s founder, Berry Gordy, died on Aug. 21 in Los Angeles. She was 87.
Her family announced the death, at a hospital. No cause was provided.
Ms. Bradford joined Mr. Gordy’s fledgling music company in 1959, when it was still called Tamla Records. Officially the front-desk secretary, she did a little bit of everything, including handling contracts and artist relations. But what she really wanted to do was write songs.
One day, not long after she started, she was at her desk when Mr. Gordy breezed in, pen and paper in hand, scrawling lyrics. She asked what the song was about.
“Money,” he said, and read some of the lines: “The best things in life are free / But you can give them to the birds and bees / I need money — that’s what I want.”
Excited, Ms. Bradford blurted out lines of her own: “Your love gives me such a thrill / But your love don’t pay my bills.”
Barrett Strong, a pianist and singer, was working in an adjacent room. He joined the conversation, and the three migrated to a studio. Over the next few days, they added more lyrics, as well as instruments and, finally, Mr. Strong’s raw, driving vocals.
Mr. Gordy released the song in 1959 on Tamla, a few months before it became Motown, and then again in 1960 through his sister Anna Gordy’s label, Anna Records.
It was Mr. Gordy’s first big hit, reaching No. 2 on the Hot R&B Sides chart and No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Beatles recorded a cover — one of many over the years — in 1963, and included it on their second studio album, “With the Beatles.”
In 1979, it unexpectedly returned to the charts, this time as a cover by the English new wave band the Flying Lizards, with monotone vocals by Deborah Evans-Stickland. That version peaked at No. 5 on the U.K. Singles chart.
There was conflict, though, over who would share the riches from the song’s publishing royalties. Mr. Strong, originally listed as a co-writer along with Mr. Gordy and Ms. Bradford, was removed from the copyright registration three years after “Money” was written, then restored in 1987 when the copyright was renewed and removed again the next year — all at the direction of Motown executives.
In a 2013 affidavit, Ms. Bradford said that she had mistakenly listed him as a co-writer on the copyright form in 1959.
The swift success of “Money” allowed Ms. Bradford to spend more time writing songs. She wrote or co-wrote several for Mary Wells, including (with Smokey Robinson) “Your Old Standby” (1963). She and Mr. Strong joined Norman Whitfield in writing “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” first recorded by the Temptations in 1966 and then by Marvin Gaye in 1969.
“Janie was one of a special group I have always thought of as the original Motown family — the unsung heroes who believed in the dream before anyone knew what Motown would become,” Mr. Gordy said in a statement after her death. “She was one of the people who helped make Motown what it became.”
Ms. Bradford was born on June 2, 1939, in Charleston, Mo., a small city near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, where her father, Richard, was a Baptist minister. Her mother, Elizabeth, managed the home.
The family later lived in St. Louis and Detroit. Among their Detroit neighbors was the singer Jackie Wilson, then beginning his career. Ms. Bradford, an avid poet, asked Mr. Wilson to introduce her to Mr. Gordy, who wrote his songs.
When they met, she told Mr. Gordy that she was something of a songwriter herself — although all she had at that point were poems. A few months later, she was surprised when Mr. Wilson brought Mr. Gordy to her house to hear some of her work.
“I knew there was a difference between poetry and songwriting,” she told the journalist Bill Dahl for his book “Motown: The Golden Years” (2001). “But I went and got my poetry and pretended I thought they were lyrics.”
They were good enough: Two of her pieces became the basis for songs on Mr. Wilson’s 1959 album “Lonely Teardrops,” and she received writing credit for one of them, “The Joke (Is Not on Me),” along with Gwen Gordy, Mr. Gordy’s sister.
Ms. Bradford married Wardene Hobbs in 1972. He survives her, along with their children, Nicole Hobbs and Lance Finney, and two grandchildren.
After Ms. Bradford left Motown in 1984, she worked in public relations and founded a magazine about the music industry, Entertainment Connection. She later started a nonprofit organization, the Heroes and Legends Scholarship Foundation, providing support to students interested in entertainment careers.
She was inducted into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame this year.
“When other companies talk about family, it’s different — Motown really did become a family from Day 1,” she told The Detroit Free Press in 2022. “We reach out to each other. We need each other.”
