Florence Ballard: Naming the Supremes, Singing 17 Feet Back and Welfare

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Florence Ballard was born in Detroit in 1943, the eighth or ninth of up to 15 children in a family that came north in the Great Migration and settled in the Brewster-Douglass housing projects. Her father Jesse, an amateur musician, taught her to sing and died of cancer when she was 15. Known as Blondie and Flo, she recruited Mary Wilson into the Primettes, dropped out of school after Berry Gordy told the group to graduate first, and in 1961 chose the name the Supremes when Motown required a change. In 1960 she was raped after a sock hop at the Graystone Ballroom, a trauma that, by Wilson's account, changed her personality and was never discussed again.

Ballard sang lead on early tracks like Buttered Popcorn, but around 1963 and 1964 Gordy made Diana Ross the lead, and the group scored 10 No. 1 hits by 1967. Struggling with depression and drinking, Ballard missed shows, Cindy Birdsong was brought in to cover, and after a July 1967 performance at the Flamingo in Las Vegas she was sent home and fired. A settlement of just under $140,000, a shelved ABC Records album and an attorney later charged with embezzlement led her to welfare before a brief recovery and her death at 32 in February 1976.

• Engineers reportedly made her stand 17 feet from the microphone because her voice was so powerful.
• Marvin Gaye called her the strongest vocalist of the three Supremes.
• At a 1974 Supremes show at Magic Mountain she only played tambourine, telling Wilson she had no ambition to sing.
• She died of a coronary thrombosis on February 22, 1976, after an insurance settlement had let her buy a house and return to the stage.
• She inspired Effie White in Dreamgirls, and received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.