Barney Ales: From a Dodge Assembly Line to Motown's National Sales Chief

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Barney Ales, the son of a Sicilian immigrant barber, started out fitting parts on a Dodge assembly line in Detroit before working local sales for Capitol Records and Warner Brothers in the 1950s. At the time the record business was intensely regional: pressing plants, independent distributors, rack jobbers who stocked pharmacies and supermarkets, and local disc jockeys who decided what got played. Ales treated that web of gatekeepers as a supply chain to be mapped and managed. In 1960 Berry Gordy hired him as Motown's national sales and promotion manager, with a mandate to push a Black-owned label onto the mainstream pop charts dominated by companies like Columbia and RCA.

The episode describes how Ales, as a white executive, could walk into segregated boardrooms and radio stations that shut out Black promoters, and how he used that access to get Motown records stocked and played. When Gordy moved the company to Los Angeles in 1972, Ales stayed in Detroit and launched his own label, Prodigal, which failed. He returned to Motown in 1975, rose to president and held the job until 1979, then worked across genres from pop to jazz to funk before his death in April 2020 at 85.

• Ales holds co-writing credits on Once Upon a Time and What's the Matter With You Baby, recorded by Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells.
• Getting a 1950s record on the charts could mean driving boxes of vinyl to distributors and taking radio programmers to steak dinners.
• The hosts argue Prodigal failed because Ales had the distribution machine but not Gordy's ear, Holland-Dozier-Holland or the Funk Brothers.
• After Motown he worked with Elton John's Rocket Records, Bob Guccione's Penthouse label and Norman Granz's Pablo Records.
• At A&M he worked directly with George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic.