Lamont Dozier, Motown Songwriting Legend, Dead at 81

Lamont Dozier, the Motown songwriter whose collaborations with Brian and Eddie Holland helped define a decade of pop music, has died. He was 81. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team was responsible for “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Heat Wave,” “Stop! In The Name of Love,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and many more. Dozier’s death was confirmed Tuesday by Paul Lambert, who produced the stage musical The First Wives Club that Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote for, reports the Associated Press.

Dozier was born in Detroit on June 16, 1941. He began working with brothers Brian and Eddie Holland in the early 1960s at various Detroit labels before they landed at Motown in 1962. Their first Motown records were performed by Martha and the Vandellas, who sang “Come and Get These Memories,” “Heat Wave,” and “Quicksand.”

The Holland-Dozier-Holland team quickly found the perfect formula that mixed pop with rhythm and blues to turn Motown into the “Sound of Young America” in the 1960s. Almost every Motown artist had a hit with at least one of their songs. The Four Tops recorded “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” “It’s the Same Old Song,” “Standing In the Shadows of Love,” and “Baby I Need Your Lovin.’” They wrote “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” for Marvin Gaye.

The Supremes recorded “Stop! In The Name of Love” and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” In 1967, The Supremes released an album of only Holland-Dozier-Holland songs, with the songwriters’ names as prominently featured as the group’s on the cover. Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote 10 No. 1 songs for The Supremes.

“A hit [happens] when something captures the imagination or the mind of the listener, and they’re completely taken by whatever the music is,” Dozier told American Songwriter in 2015. “They just get into it. They’re hypnotized by it, you might say. That’s a hit.”

Holland-Dozier-Holland’s golden age ended in 1968 when legal disputes over royalties and other problems led them to leave Motown. The label suffered, since the Supremes, the Four Tops, and others were now suddenly without the songwriters and producers behind their greatest successes. H-D-H no longer had the stars to record their work and their labels failed. Still, their music continues to live on thanks to the countless covers of their songs. The trio was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Dozier had a few successes without the Holland brothers. He helped produce Aretha Franklin’s Sweet Passion album and had his own hit with “Trying to Hold on to My Woman.” He also earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing Phil Collins’ song “Two Hearts” from the 1988 movie Buster. In 2009, he worked with the Hollands again for The First Wives Club, but they clashed and Dozier left the show before it opened.

Although the reunion with the Hollands didn’t work out, Dozier acknowledged the importance of collaboration in the songwriting process. “Making a record, for instance, there’s a lot of pieces to it. You’ve got your engineer, you’ve got the people that are gonna write with you, or maybe if you write it all by yourself, you still don’t do it by yourself, because there’s so many people involved in it. Everybody adds their own interpretation of how a feeling should go,” he told American Songwriter. “That’s what happens when you collaborate.”