Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Baby A Go-Go - Barbara McNair
2. All Your Love - Brenda Holloway
3. He Was Really Sayin' Somethin' - Earl Van Dyke, The Soulbrothers
4. Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead - The Contours
5. Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) - Chris Clark
6. Baby Hit And Run - The Contours
7. How Can I - Brenda Holloway
8. I Like Everything About You - The Contours, Dennis Edwards
9. All I Do Is Think About You - Tammi Terrell
10. Lucky Lucky Me - Jimmy Ruffin
11. In The Neighborhood - Jimmy Ruffin
12. My World Is Crumbling - Brenda Holloway
13. Poor Little Rich Girl - The Marvelettes
14. Save My Love For A Rainy Day - Marvin Johnson
15. Tell Me It's Just A Rumor Baby - The Funk Brothers
16. If You Ever Get Your Hands On Love - Gladys Knight & The Pips
17. Are You Sure Love Is The Name Of This Game - Stevie Wonder
18. Until You Came Along - Carolyn Crawford
19. Before It's Over - Sammy Ward
20. Long Gone Lover - The Velvelettes

Disc 2:

1. My Sugar Baby - Frank Wilson
2. Here Are The Pieces Of My Broken Heart - Gladys Knight & The Pips
3. There's A Definite Change In You - The Temptations
4. Who You Gonna Run To - Brenda Holloway
5. It's Easy To Fall In Love (With A Guy Like You) - Martha Reeves & The Vandellas
6. The Touch Of Venus - Patrice Holloway
7. I Wish I Liked You (As Much As I Love You) - Marvin Gaye
8. Trapped In A Love Affair - Brenda Holloway
9. (Stop Leading Me On) I Know How To Love Her - Jimmy Ruffin
10. Riding High On Love - Jr. Walker & The All Stars
11. Why When Love Is Gone - The Originals
12. If This World Were Mine - Fantastic Four
13. Don't Let Me Down - Kim Weston
14. Don't Put Off Till Tomorrow What You Can Do Today - The Monitors
15. (Tell Me) Ain't It The Truth - J.J. Barnes
16. You Made Me Feel Like (Everything Is Alright) - Syreeta
17. A Weakspot In My Heart - The Isley Brothers
18. Don't Make Me Live Without Your Love - The Lewis Sisters
19. It Must Be Love Baby - Chuck Jackson, Yvonne Fair
20. Ain't No Place Like Motown - The Velvelettes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22638 in Music
• Released on: 2002-06-03
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: Box set
• Running time: 113 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Compiled by Jazz FM's Richard Searling, A Cellarful of Motown is a truly astonishing 40-track collection featuring 39 previously unreleased 60s cuts plucked from Hitsville's archives. It's simply mind-boggling that only one of these stunning tracks--Jnr Walker's "Riding High on Love"--received an official release at the time. Incredibly, the others flunked Motown's weekly "quality control" meetings and were consigned to the vaults. Surely no other label in the history of popular music is blessed with such a boundless provision of timeless nuggets. Each gem here has been fastidiously restored from the original master tapes, so although many of these tunes are available as vinyl bootlegs on the northern-soul scene they are generally poorly pressed with inferior sound quality. This, then, is the compilation that Motown collectors have feverishly anticipated for years. It's almost impossible to pick standouts as the quality throughout is eye-rotatingly brilliant; however, celestial moments include Barbara McNair's infectious frugger "Baby A-Go-Go", Earl Van Dyke's exhilarating instrumental stampede through "He Was Really Sayin' Something", and one of the biggest northern-soul discoveries of recent years, Gladys Knight's phenomenal "If You Ever Get Your Hands on Love". This is an absolutely essential purchase for anyone even remotely interested in soul music. --Chris King

Customer Reviews

Quality control
So what's this all about-Motown spending huge amounts of money then shovelling the results into the vaults where it would remain for 40 years!
How do these "experts" know what the public will buy? After all it was only through the Beatles that TM took off in the U K.
It must have made the artists wonder what they'd done wrong!
Especially Gladys Knight who was already seeing all her Fury and Vee Jay things reissued on LP.Then TM issue her cover of The Nitty Gritty-hardly essential really as Shirley Ellis had cornered the market with this one.
Interesting though the way T M covered their own songs with their own artists but through the years the CD Age has seen a mass amount of the music using any excuse to reissue it and then repeating the same old song.
Personally I prefer the early Motown up to 1964 and its this area which needs to be explored next-we've been getting dribs and drabs since the 60s.I don't mean the recent box sets by year but CDs the average collector could find easily

"Ain't No Place Like Motown!"
This 2 cd set collection is a Motown lover's dream. 99% is culled from the vaults. 98% is brilliant. Most of these wonderful tracks should've been released as singles, especially, Barbara McNair's "Baby A Go-Go", JJ Barnes' "(Tell Me) Ain't It The Truth", Gladys Knight & The Pips' "If You Ever Get Your Hands on Love", Earl Van Dyke & The Soul Brothers "Tell Me It's Just A Rumour Baby", Marv Johnson's version of "Save My Love for a Rainy Day" and Brenda Holloway's soul drenched "All Your Love." There's just too many excellent tracks on this set. Honorable mention goes out to The Contours, The Fantastic Four, Martha Reeves And The Vandellas, Frank Wilson, Stevie Wonder,Kim Weston, Jimmy Ruffin, The Marvelettes, Junior Walker & The All Stars, The Monitors and the other 4 Brenda Holloway cuts included. Hopefully, "A Cellarful of Motown" is volume 1 of many superb collections to be released onto the marketplace.

These are the rejects!!!
I only got this because I really like the Velvelettes and it was so cheap. But I'm amazed at the quality throughout. Only Motown could have thought these records weren't worth releasing.

Most of the recordings aren't obvious single hits so maybe that was why they were buried. The best tracks come from Motown's "second division" such as Brenda Holloway and Jimmy Ruffin, though the standout for me is Gladys Knight and the Pips' "If you ever get your hands on love".

Most albums dug up from the archives are just for completists (like me) but this should work for anyone who loves 60s soul.