Raynoma Gordy Singleton: Miss Ray's 5,000 Bootleg Copies of My Guy

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Raynoma Mayberry was born in Detroit in March 1937, the eighth child of her mother Lucille and the first of her father Ashby, a Cadillac janitor. After a marriage to musician Charles Liles and the birth of son Cliff in December 1955, she auditioned in 1958 with her sister Alice for a young songwriter named Berry Gordy. He passed on their singing, but she told him she could write lead sheets and arrange, and he hired her. She organized the backing group the Rayber Voices, with Brian Holland, Robert Bateman and Sonny Sanders, and the pair formed the Rayber Music Writing Company.

With Smokey Robinson, she pushed Gordy to start his own label, found the house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard that became Hitsville USA, and ran the Jobete publishing arm with her brother Mike Ossman and receptionist Janie Bradford. She married Gordy in 1960 and had son Kerry, but the marriage ended in a Mexican divorce by mail after his affair with Margaret Norton. She then opened a Jobete office in New York, and when funding from Detroit fell short she had 5,000 bootleg copies of Mary Wells' My Guy pressed and sold. Gordy was furious but did not press charges.

Her later husband Eddie Singleton warned her against the bootleg scheme.
Gordy loaned the couple the money to start Shrine Records in Washington, D.C., which did not succeed.
She returned to Detroit and Motown in 1968 and later worked under a Gordy-funded arrangement called Super 3.
She executive produced Rockwell's 1984 album Somebody's Watching Me and its 1985 follow-up Captured, made by Gordy's son Kennedy.
She died of brain cancer in Woodland Hills, California, in 2016 at 79.

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