Wanda Young: From Nursing Student to Marvelettes Lead and a 1989 Comeback

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Wanda LaFaye Young was born in August 1943 and raised in Inkster, Michigan, one of ten children of Ford plant worker James and homemaker Beatrice. She was studying for nursing exams when classmate Gladys Horton asked her to audition after Georgia Dobbins left the group because her father forbade secular music. The group, then called the Casinyets, auditioned for Berry Gordy with Please Mr. Postman, which Dobbins had co-written. Renamed the Marvelettes, they took the song to No. 1 in late 1961 as Motown's first No. 1 pop single, and it held No. 1 on the R&B chart for seven weeks.

Wanda sang the B-side, So Long Baby, and gradually became the main lead on hits including Don't Mess With Bill, I'll Keep Holding On and The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game. The group passed on Where Did Our Love Go for Too Many Fish in the Sea, which stalled at No. 25. By 1970 the group had broken up, her Smokey Robinson-produced solo album was released as The Return of the Marvelettes, and Motown's 1972 move to Los Angeles left her behind. She divorced Miracles member Bobby Rogers in 1975, endured family violence and years of alcohol and drug addiction, and lost custody of her children.

• Florence Ballard of the Supremes filled in for Wanda during her 1962 maternity leave.
• Her sister was murdered at the family home in Inkster, and her brother was badly hurt in a separate shooting.
• In 1989 Ian Levine's Motorcity Records brought her back to the studio, where Kim Weston helped her through the sessions.
• She and Gladys Horton released The Marvelettes Now, with a cover modeled on their 1967 pink album.
• Her daughter Miracle was murdered in Inkster in 2015, and Wanda died of COPD in Garden City, Michigan, in December 2021 at 78.