She was the sweet, pretty one on the right, always with the right moves and purring backup vocals Mary Wilson was also the one who kept the Supremes flame alive, collecting their gowns for exhibitions and writing books, including her 2019 tome on their glittery style, “Supreme Glamour.”
That sweet backup singer in Motown’s most celebrated girl group the Supremes had a run of 12 No. 1 hits morphed into a sultry jazzy vocalist in recent years, but Wilson never tired of talking about the Supremes and their meteoric rise to fame.
Wilson died of heart disease Monday at her longtime Henderson, Nevada, home at 76, said her publicist Jay Schwartz. But her heart was always in Detroit, where she grew up a music-crazy teenager in the Brewster-Douglass Projects, before being signed to Motown in 1961 with friends Diana Ross and Florence Ballard.
Feb 9, 2021 - 6:13 pm
The Supremes were still in high school when their star began to rise, and at the dawn of 1962, their co-founder, Mary Wilson, sat in a modern literature class pondering her relationship to others. For her final exam, she had to write an essay with a psychological bent. While addressing her chaotic childhood, Wilson inadvertently summed up her dynamic with the other Supremes the wounded Florence Ballard and the dogged Diana Ross. I have developed a protective shell, which whenever I feel I may face a conflict, I draw into. Why? Is it because I subconsciously feel I might be snatched again? Wilson wrote in her 1986 autobiography