Listen Live
PraiseIndy Featured Video
CLOSE

California– Gladys Horton gave Motown Records its first No. 1 hit, as the lead voice of the Marvelettes on the 1961 classic “Please Mr. Postman.”

She spent the last several decades of her life in a frustrating attempt to get the group’s name back, after Motown sold it to a promoter who assigned it to an unrelated group that sang Marvelettes songs.

Horton died Wednesday night at a nursing home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where she had been recovering from a stroke and pneumonia.

She was 66 and while she never did get the Marvelettes’ name back, she will be remembered for defining the sound of Motown’s breakthrough female vocal group.

Read more at the NYD

RELATED: