Marvelettes co-founder Katherine Anderson Schaffner dies at 79 in Dearborn
Singer Katherine Anderson Schaffner, who helped Motown Records achieve its first No. 1 pop hit with her group the Marvelettes, died Tuesday night at Corewell Health Dearborn. She was 79.
Schaffner, the group’s second soprano and an outspoken advocate for the group’s legacy, was hospitalized in July with heart issues and was privately visited by friends and family members in the days before her death, her daughter told the Detroit Free Press.
A memorial for the longtime Inkster resident is planned for January, tied to what would have been her 80th birthday, though it has not been determined whether the event will be open to the public.
With the Marvelettes, which she co-founded, the Inkster native born Katherine Anderson — known to friends as Kat — was a voice on hits such as “Please Mr. Postman,” “Playboy,” “Beechwood 4-5789,” “Too Many Fish in the Sea,” “Don’t Mess with Bill” and “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.”
Schaffner was with the group through 1969, by which point the original lineup she’d help form with several high school friends had dissolved. She devoted herself to family life, raising two daughters and a son, though she would continue to foster the group’s legacy at awards shows, interviews, autograph signings and others events, including a Marvelettes tribute tour of England in 2017.
“Everything turned to her family. Music was behind her at that point,” said her daughter Keisha Schaffner. “She was always 100% attached to the Marvelettes, but she detached herself from Motown when they left Detroit (in the early 1970s).”
Rick Sperling, founder and former director of Detroit’s Mosaic Youth Theatre, worked closely with the singer on the 2005 musical “Now That I Can Dance — 1962,” which was based on Schaffner’s telling of the Marvelettes' history. The play became Mosaic’s biggest in-house success and was reprised three times through the years.
“Kat was an incredible storyteller and had a blunt sense of humor,” said Sperling. “I have tapes and tapes of interviews with her that I could never put in the play. But she was a wonderful historian and wonderful person who told it like it was. She was a realist and had such a life force.”
Sperling, now head of the Detroit arts support group DEYA, called Schaffner a “real original” who “developed a really strong relationship with the young women (in the Mosaic cast). She gave so much, and they loved her.
“It was exciting for her that the story of the Marvelettes be told because for many years it had kind of been left out of the Motown story,” Sperling said.
Born Jan. 16, 1944, Schaffner grew up in Inkster’s Carver Homes community.
“As soon as you stepped outside, you could hear music coming from every apartment,” she told author Marc Myers for the 2016 book “Anatomy of a Song.” “I listened to all kinds of music back then on the radio or at friends’ houses. I couldn’t afford records and didn’t start buying them until after I was a Marvelette.”
Her father was a cement worker, her mother a nurse’s aide, and Schaffner honed her singing skills in gospel groups and Inkster High School’s glee club. That school activity led her to link up with classmates Gladys Horton, Georgeanna Tillman, Georgia Dobbins and Juanita Cowert for a 1961 talent competition that promised a Motown audition for the winner.
Although their group finished fourth, Schaffner and friends nevertheless secured a Motown tryout via a school guidance counselor, and the teen group landed a contract with the fledgling Detroit record company, with Dobbins replaced by singer Wanda Young.
The Marvelettes’ buoyant first single, “Please Mr. Postman,” was released in summer 1961 and became Motown’s first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the first chart-topping pop song by a Black-owned record company and would go on to be famously covered by the Beatles two years later.
“We may have been from Inkster, but we kicked the door open for everyone else at Motown to walk through,” Schaffner told Myers.
During their ‘60s run, Schaffner and the group worked with a variety of Motown’s songwriters and producers at the company’s Hitsville, U.S.A., studio, including Smokey Robinson, Robert Bateman, Norman Whitfield and Brian and Eddie Holland.
Schaffner and the Marvelettes were honored with the Rhythm & Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Award in 1995 and inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2004. The group was an inaugural inductee to the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame in 2013 and has been twice nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“She really kept the story of the Marvelettes alive for so many other people,” Sperling said. “We were honored and privileged to be able to tell her story to a larger audience.”
Schaffner is survived by her daughters, Keisha Schaffner and Kalaine Schaffner Tamlin. No funeral is planned, according to Keisha Schaffner.
Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Marvelettes co-founder Katherine Anderson Schaffner dies at 79
