Motown figure Esther Gordy Edwards dies at age 91 (AP)

DETROIT – Esther Gordy Edwards, who helped build Motown Records alongside her brother Berry Gordy Jr. and led efforts to turn its original Detroit headquarters into a museum, has died. She was 91.

Edwards died Wednesday surrounded by family and friends in Detroit, the Motown Historical Museum said in a statement.

Edwards was a Motown executive for nearly three decades, holding numerous leadership positions within the music company whose artists included Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations and The Four Tops. Motown Records, which Berry Gordy started with a family loan in 1959, churned out scores of global hits from the building it dubbed "Hitsville, U.S.A." in Detroit. The company moved to Los Angeles in 1972.

Edwards served as senior vice president, corporate secretary and director of Motown International Operations, where she was charged with exposing the famed "Motown sound" to international audiences.

Wonder has praised Edwards for being like a mother to him when he joined the label as a child. She is credited with helping Wonder enroll in the Michigan School for the Blind, as well as managing and guiding the careers of Robinson, Gaye, Diana Ross and others.

"She believed in me — when I was 14 years old and many other people didn't or could only see what they could at the time, she championed me being in Motown," Wonder said in a statement. "I shared with her many of my songs first before anyone else."

When Motown and most of her family moved to California, Edwards stayed behind. She amassed what would become Motown memorabilia and set to work on preserving the old headquarters, including the label's famed Studio A. The large stately former house on West Grand Boulevard opened as a museum in 1985.

"I always thought I was the visionary in the family but I missed the biggest thing of all when Esther turned the so-called trash left behind after I sold the company in 1988 into a phenomenal world-class monument at the spot where Hitsville started — the Motown museum," Berry Gordy said in a statement Thursday.

"She nurtured it and held it together, all through the years, to protect the Motown legacy for generations to come — which is only one of the reasons people all over the world will remember and celebrate Esther Gordy Edwards," he said.

Gordy also said Edwards gave him "the hardest time" when he sought to get the family loan to start what would become Motown Records. She became, he said, "one of my biggest assets at Motown."

According to an official biography released by the museum, Edwards was born in 1920 in Oconee, Ga., and moved to Detroit as a toddler. She was the eldest daughter in a family of eight children.

She first married Robert Bullock, with whom she had a son, Robert Berry Bullock. She later married state Rep. George Edwards and became a step-mother to his son, Harry.

One of her sisters, Anna Gordy Gaye, was Marvin Gaye's first wife.

In a statement, Robinson said Edwards was "one of the most important people to come into my life both personally and professionally." He said it's because of Edwards' "wisdom and foresight" that the museum exists, allowing "people now and for generations to come to have a firsthand look at our legacy."

"Thank you, Esther, and I know you are in the hands of God," he said.

A public viewing is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday at the James H. Cole Northwest Chapel in Detroit.

A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Bethel AME Church in Detroit.

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Marvin Gaye exhibit opens at Detroit Motown museum (AP)

DETROIT – The Motown Historical Museum is celebrating the life and times, as well as the moves and grooves, of Marvin Gaye.

The Detroit museum, located in the original home of Motown Records Corp., has unveiled an exhibit chronicling the legendary artist's two decades at Motown, from 1960 to 1982. The exhibit in the second-floor gallery opened Friday and runs through at least September.

It's the first time the museum has produced a major exhibit on Gaye, and follows a successful installation on the Jackson 5 last year that marked the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson.

The largely chronological exhibit features Gaye's album covers, sheet music, costumes from concerts and even a Marvin Gaye Way street sign from Washington, D.C., the hometown of the man born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. in 1939 and fatally shot by his father in 1984 after a violent argument.

Chief curator Lina Stephens said the museum had been planning a Gaye exhibit for a while but Jackson's death "shifted a lot of things" around. One thing is clear: Gaye's exhibit has many more items and artifacts because of his lengthy tenure with the label.

"He was a good artist to focus on because he was here since just about the beginning," Stephens said. "It's easy to incorporate his story line."

The display spans the career of a man who helped create, refine and redefine the sound of the label and popular music itself, including playing piano and drums on "Please Mister Postman," singing the chart-topping smash "I Heard it Through the Grapevine," and tackling political and environmental concerns with "What's Going On" and "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)."

"He started out singing songs he thought he wanted to sing," Janis Gaye, Gaye's ex-wife, told The Associated Press by phone from her home in Providence, R.I. "When he hit 'What's Going On' and started having his own voice in every way — arrangements, lyrically and spiritually — that opened a whole new door for him."

Janis Gaye, who was with Marvin Gaye for 11 years and married to him from 1977 to 1981, said she has been talking to museum officials about the exhibit and hopes to loan a few signature items, such as his Grammy awards and silver platform boots she designed for him.

She said she took his "everyday boots" and had rhinestones and platforms put on them. They later became synonymous with Gaye, appearing on album covers and a magazine spread.

The boots were "one staple he really did love," Janis Gaye said, and they will be difficult to part with — even temporarily.

"I told (museum officials) I may have to sleep there for the next nine months," she said.

The exhibit includes an early single by Gaye on Motown's subsidiary label, Anna, named for Motown founder Berry Gordy's sister — the woman who became Gaye's first wife. He was still married to Anna Gordy Gaye in 1973 when he met Janis Gaye, who was 17 at the time and is now 55.

Janis Gaye said she is writing a book about her life with the man she describes as her "dear, sweet ex-husband" that's expected to be released later this year.

"We must have broken up and gotten back together at least 20 or 30 times," she said. "It was a magical time, at times. ... There are many, many memories to look back on — some fond, some not so fond."

She said she hopes museum visitors see the depth of his creativity and recognize his enduring legacy, which includes a performance next May of the "What's Going On" album by John Legend and The Roots with the National Symphony Orchestra. It marks the 40th anniversary of Gaye performing the album at the same venue.

"I would just like for people to see his whole body of work," Janis Gaye said. "Socially conscious, sexually conscious, whatever it happens to be. It's all Marvin. It all came from that one mind."

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