06/16/2026
James Jamerson was too drunk to sit on the stool, so he played the bassline to "What's Going On" lying flat on his back on the studio floor. Marvin Gaye had to pull him out of a bar to do it. That bassline is now one of the most studied in history. Flat on his back, and still the best in the building.
The first sound on "My Girl" is three notes on a bass, climbing, and the man who played them was printed on nothing. His name was James Jamerson, and for most of his life the record labels did not carry it.
He played on more number-one records than any bass player in the history of American music. The exact count is argued over, but it runs past twenty on the pop chart and past fifty on the rhythm and blues chart.
The band he played in was Motown's house band, the Funk Brothers. The documentary that finally told their story said they cut more number-one hits than the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley combined.
You have heard him a thousand times without ever being told his name.
He was born on Edisto Island, South Carolina, in 1936. His father worked the Charleston shipyards, his grandmother kept a piano in the house, and an aunt sang in the church choir.
In 1954 he and his mother went north to Detroit, the way hundreds of thousands of Black families went north in those years. He was eighteen.
He picked up the upright bass in high school, and he got so good so fast that the police gave him a permit to play the clubs while he was still a minor. You could see him driving across Detroit with the neck of that bass sticking out his car window, on his way to a jazz date.
When the electric bass came to him, he played it with one finger.
It was the index finger of his right hand, and he had a name for it. He called it the Hook.
Everyone else used two fingers, or three. His one moved faster and surer than other men's three, because that was how his hand had always done it.
He bought a sunburst Fender Precision bass and he never changed the strings. The dead, thumping sound of worn strings was the sound he wanted, and he had a line for it.
The gunk creates the funk, he said.
He had been a piano kid, so he heard the whole chord, not just the root. He built a second melody underneath the singer, a song hiding inside the song, and he never once simplified it for the radio.
In late 1959 he started recording for a young Detroit songwriter named Berry Gordy. The studio was in the basement of a house on West Grand Boulevard with a sign that read Hitsville U.S.A., and the musicians called it the Snake Pit.
Gordy had pulled the best players out of Detroit's jazz clubs and set them making pop records three sessions a day. They became the Funk Brothers, and Gordy called Jamerson a genius on the bass.
Between 1963 and 1968 he played on nearly every record the company released.
The records sold in the tens of millions and turned Motown into one of the most profitable Black-owned companies in the country. The men in that basement were paid by the session and earned not one cent in royalties.
Motown did not print the names of its session musicians on its records. Not until 1971.
So the bassline that opens "My Girl" went out into the world in 1964 with no name on it at all.
Smokey Robinson wrote the song, and the Temptations cut it in that same basement. David Ruffin took the lead for the first time, and his deep, grained voice needed something plain to sit on.
Jamerson gave him three notes. They climb, they settle, they climb again, and they are the first thing you hear before anyone sings a word.
Robert White answered the bass with a bright guitar figure, the strings that Paul Riser arranged came in over the top, and the record went to number one on both the pop and the rhythm and blues charts. A Motown producer named Cornelius Grant heard that bassline years later and called it classic Jamerson.
The label named the group. It did not name him.
Because no one wrote down who played on what, the credits became something people fought over for decades.
A West Coast bassist named Carol Kaye has long said she played on some of the hits the histories hand to Jamerson, and the argument never fully ended, because the paperwork that could settle it was never kept.
What is not in dispute is the three-note figure on the 1964 Temptations recording. The strongest sources, the Library of Congress among them, credit it to Jamerson.
Seven years later, in January of 1971, Marvin Gaye started making a record about Vietnam and poverty and the state of the country, and he wanted Jamerson on it. The night they cut the title track, Jamerson was at a bar instead, where the Funk Brothers went after their day sessions to drink.
He drank a great deal.
The arranger on the record, David Van De Pitte, remembered that Jamerson kept a bottle of Greek brandy in his bass case, and that it took an enormous amount to put him under.
That night it had. When Gaye found him and got him back to the studio, he could not sit up straight on the stool.
So he lay down on the floor.
Flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling, he played the bassline to "What's Going On" from there. Van De Pitte had written the part out in Jamerson's own style, and Jamerson read it down off the page and loved it.
What came off that floor is one of the most studied basslines ever recorded. It moves and bends and sings under Gaye's voice, and it sounds like a man in full command of everything he had, which that night, by every account, he was not.
When he got home, his wife Annie was awake. He told her the song was a masterpiece, and she remembered it because he almost never spoke about his work that way.
And that same album, in 1971, is where his name appears on a major Motown release for the first time. On the sleeve, the credit reads, the incomparable James Jamerson.
Twelve years, hundreds of records, and one sleeve.
It was the only such credit the company gave him while he lived.
In 1972 Motown left Detroit for Los Angeles, and the basement went quiet. Jamerson followed the work west, but Los Angeles already had its own deep bench of players, and he was one more bassist in a crowded town.
The calls got fewer, and the drinking that had ridden alongside the playing for years began to pull out ahead of it. Joe Hunter, who had led the Funk Brothers in the early days, said Jamerson believed he played better loosened up, and for a long while he could drink and still deliver.
Then that stopped being true.
He spent stretches of the early 1980s in the hospital.
And then there was the spring of 1983.
Motown threw itself a televised party that March for its twenty-fifth anniversary, and the whole country watched it. Diana Ross was there, and Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, and the Jackson 5.
Michael Jackson did the moonwalk for the first time on that stage. Every act up there sang songs the Funk Brothers had built down in the basement.
Not one of the Funk Brothers was invited. Not by Berry Gordy, not by a single producer, not by one of the stars who had ridden their playing to fame.
Jamerson bought a ticket.
He went to the taping as a member of the public. He sat up high, in the balcony, and watched other people perform his music on camera while his own name went unspoken.
Picture him up there, forty-seven years old, his health failing, his work gone, his bass at home. Watching a company toast a quarter century of a sound his one finger had done more than anyone's to shape.
He did not make a scene. He watched, and then he went home.
Around this time, in a break-in at his Los Angeles house, the bass was taken. It was the sunburst Fender Precision he had played on most of those records, the one he called the Funk Machine, and it has never been found.
On August 2, 1983, James Jamerson died in Los Angeles.
He was forty-seven.
He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit, not far from the basement where he made his life's work. For thirty-eight years, the rules of that cemetery allowed only a flat plate in the ground to mark him.
You could have walked across the grass over James Jamerson and never known whose music was under your feet.
He did not live to see what came next.
In 2000 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame put him in its first class of sidemen. In 2002 the documentary about the Funk Brothers reached theaters and put faces to the basement at last.
Bass Player magazine ranked him the greatest bass player of all time in 2017, and Rolling Stone did the same in 2020. Paul McCartney called him the biggest influence on his own playing.
His son, James Jamerson Jr., became a session bassist too. He said his father made him learn the upright before he was ever allowed to touch an electric, and that when his father sat down to play, he just danced on the bass.
In 2021, thirty-eight years after that flat plate went into the ground, his family set a real headstone at Woodlawn. It is black marble, it carries his face and the words loving husband, father, son and musician, and on top of it sits a bronze sculpture of his Fender Precision bass.
So the bass came back to him in bronze, set over his name, finally carved where anyone can read it.
The real one is still gone, still out there somewhere, still never found.
Two years later, South Carolina renamed a road on the island where he was born the James Lee Jamerson Memorial Highway. A state representative called him the hot beat of Motown.
The three notes still open "My Girl" every single day, on a radio somewhere, in a movie, at a wedding, sounding exactly the way they did in 1964.
You know whose notes they are now.
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