The Flame Show Bar was a fabled Detroit venue for jazz and R&B performers during the 1950s, hosting the likes of Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Etta James and many more. Moreover, the club helped get Berry Gordy and the Motown machine up and running and launched the careers of Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famers Jackie Wilson and LaVern Baker.

The nightclub stood in the heart of the Sugar Hill neighborhood on the southeast corner of John R and East Canfield, just on the outskirts of Paradise Valley, a thriving Black neighborhood lined with snazzy clubs and Black-owned small businesses. The Flame Show Bar would become one of the swankiest spots along John R, which the Black press at the time often called “the Street of Music.”

"The Flame was arguably the city's most musically sophisticated nightspot, with a sharp band and a succession of featured singers," the Free Press wrote May 15, 1983.

The Flame was also perhaps Detroit’s most popular “black and tan,” an integrated club that served both Black and white patrons at a time when segregation was still rampant, even in the Midwest. The club, which showcased mostly Black acts, was actually owned by a white Jewish man, Morris Wasserman.

Wasserman was the son of Julius Wasserman, a wealthy Detroit developer and builder. The younger Wasserman had become a successful businessman in his own right, owning Wasserman's Loans, a pawnshop at 3600 Hastings St. at Rowena (later renamed Mack Avenue) in Detroit's Black Bottom. Perhaps because of his business’ location in a predominately Black neighborhood, Wasserman had developed a love for Black music. In 1934, Wasserman opened the Club Harlem, a jazz club in the basement of the Lawn Apartments at 285 E. Vernor Hwy. at Brush Street. The Harlem was also a black and tan, tearing down color barriers almost a decade before the 1943 Detroit race riot. The opening of the Club Harlem seemingly couldn’t have been better timed, as it came during the Jazz Era and on the heels of the repeal of Prohibition, but the club folded after only a year. (The Club Harlem is not to be confused with the Club Little Harlem, which opened in 1940 at 2113 Chene St.)

Undeterred, Wasserman would try again 14 years later with the Flame Show Bar. He pulled permits Jan. 6, 1948, to erect a cinder-block commercial building at John R and Canfield. Originally, the plan was for a biergarten and five storefronts, but that May 17, he revised his plan to make it seven. The value of the development was pegged at $75,000, the equivalent of about $1 million in 2025, when adjusted for inflation. It’s unclear whether any of these storefronts opened, because on Dec. 14, 1948, Wasserman was approved for yet another permit for the property, this time to change its use to three storefronts and a “public establishment.” That public establishment would be the Flame Show Bar. Wasserman would have far greater success with this nightclub than his first go.

Red-hot entertainment

The Flame Show opened June 24, 1949, with a seven-night run by Nellie Lutcher and Snooky Young, as well as bass aficionado Slam Stewart. The Flame billed itself as “the hottest place in town.”

The Flame Show was where gritty R&B met cocktail glitter. The room had mirrors on three sides, and all the glitzy glamour and moody lighting helped give the venue the nickname “Little Las Vegas.” Those who didn’t get a table could pony up to the 100-foot bar, where bartenders Henry Jones and Henry Idslet slung drinks.

Touring artists would usually play extended engagements, usually of a week or more, playing hour-long sets that followed a local act or performance by dancers such as Lottie “The Body” Tatum-Graves, a popular burlesque star. These shows were produced by Joe “Ziggy” Johnson, a veteran of the business, and brought a polished presentation to the Flame. Many of the big acts performed multiple shows a night, which helped since the venue seated only 250 people. Long lines to get in were common, but it was said that if you slipped doorman Larry Ransom a few bucks, you could sneak in. Floorman Burma Red made sure guests were happy.

"Three years ago, Detroit had only three so-called 'black and tan' night clubs attracting any noticeable business," The Detroit Tribune wrote July 21, 1951. "Today, this type of night club is to be found all over the city. One is apt to ask why. The answer is probably to be found in the Flame Show Bar, the Morris Wasserman-owned bistro located at the corner of John R and East Canfield. Since its opening in July of 1949, it has attracted more patrons than any other spot located on the city's east side and catering to patronage without regard to color and the like." The paper called the Flame "the biggest nightclub in all Detroit."

The list of big time acts who headlined at the Flame Show Bar is staggering: LaVern Baker, Big Maybelle, Earl Bostic, Brook Benton, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Ruth Brown, Solomon Burke, Cab Calloway, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Bo Diddley (including a New Year’s Eve performance in 1956), Bill Doggett, The Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gillespie & His All-Star Combo, B. B. King and his Three O'Clock in the Morning Orchestra, Roy Hamilton, Ivory Joe Hunter, Etta James & The Peaches, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, Moms Mabley, Clyde McPhatter, Johnny Nash, Esther Phillips, Arthur Prysock, Johnny Ray, Della Reese, Nina Simone, Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Jackie Wilson, Jimmy Witherspoon and more. Harry Belafonte was said to have received encouragement early in his career when performing at the Flame Show Bar from Dec. 9-14, 1949. All of these stars performed on the Flame Show’s stage to intimate crowds of just a few hundred at a time.

But none was bigger than Lady Day.

Star power

Billie Holiday arrived for an unheard-of-today run of 14 nights at the Flame, starting July 8, 1949 - just two weeks after the club had opened.

"The incomparable Billie Holiday - 'Lady Day' to her thousands of avid worshippers the world over - began her initial Detroit show bar appearance July 8 at the beautiful new Flame Show Bar ... before a throng of Billie Holliday fans who have clamored long and loudly for their sultry-voiced idol to sing the tempestuous songs that have kept her on top in the entertainment field for the last decade," the Detroit Tribune wrote July 16, 1949.

She was followed by Dinah Washington, again for a 14-day engagement, from Aug. 5-18, 1949.

As a testament to the Flame’s reputation and the enthusiasm of its crowds, many of the stars would keep coming back over the venue’s 14-year run, even when they could have performed at bigger venues.

Holiday returned to the Flame Show for a weeklong run May 11-17, 1956, and again on May 17-23, 1957, and Sept. 19-25, 1958. Considering Holiday was packing Carnegie Hall at the time, the thought of seeing her in such a small venue is enough to give music buffs shivers.

B.B. King played at least 30 shows there over the years. Sam Cooke performed at the venue on four occasions, May 22-June 4, 1959; Oct. 2-8, 1959; May 27-June 2, 1960; and June 16-25, 1961. Etta James came thrice, on June 24-30, 1955; Feb. 27-March 5, 1959; and Oct. 12-21, 1962. Ray Charles played there Sept. 12-25, 1952, and again June 20-26, 1958.

From May 24-June 6, 1957, the headliners were Olivette Miller and Bert Gibson's Highlights. Sharing the bill with them was a young “singing quartet” that had just changed its name from The Four Aims to The Four Tops. The Tops would return Sept. 6-19, 1957, as part of a bill called the Idlewild Revue, sharing the stage with blues legend T-Bone Walker and Detroit’s own Della Reese.

Idlewild was known as Michigan’s “Black Eden,” a resort town for African Americans in the northwestern Lower Peninsula - 250 miles from Detroit - that thrived for nearly half a century. Established in 1912, Idlewild was only the nation’s third resort offering Black visitors rest, relaxation and sanctuary at a time when segregation was in full force. Madam C.J. Walker and W.E.B. DuBois were among those who bought property there. Following World War II, and thanks to newfound wealth among African Americans who moved to Detroit for factory jobs, Idewild would see up to 25,000 visitors each weekend. All those folks needed entertainment, and there was no shortage of Black performers eager to take to its stages, especially at Arthur Braggs' famed Paradise Club.

“If you were a Black entertainer ... you did Idlewild,” Ronald Stephens, a Purdue University professor who wrote two books about Idlewild, told Second Wave Media for an Oct. 10, 2020, article. “It was like how in the ’60s, if you were to be recognized in entertainment, you had to be approved at the Apollo at Harlem. Well, the same dynamic happened in Idlewild.”

When not entertaining the masses during summers at Idewild, Braggs took the Idlewild Revue on the road. It would return to the Flame Show Bar on Dec. 26, 1958-Jan. 8, 1959, this time with the Four Tops supporting jazz great Betty Carter, who had grown up in Detroit. The Tops and the Revue were back Sept. 11-24, 1959, with blues great Big Maybelle and Arthur Prysock, and on Sept. 8-17, 1961, with Etta Jones (not James) and Leon Escobar’s Spanish Dancers (featuring a “cast of 35”). Three years later, the Four Tops would sign to Motown Records.

Though some of these out-of-town stars brought their own musicians and combos to the Flame Show Bar, many acts relied on the house band to back them up. It just so happened that the Flame Show Bar had one of the finest around, led by a legendary figure in his own right, Maurice King and his seven-piece band, the mighty Wolverines.

The mighty Mo

King was the band leader at the Flame for more than a decade, starting in 1950. He would later find a home at Motown, where he spent a decade as musical director of artist development and as a mentor to everyone from Stevie Wonder to The Spinners. He also was known as Motown’s “musical troubleshooter,” and is credited with bringing a 12-year-old Gladys Knight to the Motor City, launching her career. Several Motown stars have described King as a “father figure” at Hitsville, U.S.A.

He was born Clarence King in 1911 in Greenwood, Miss., and was the youngest of six. Starting out on clarinet, he would switch to the alto sax in high school. The family moved to Detroit in 1937, and he quickly became an in-demand sax player around town. In 1943, he took a gig managing the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a popular “girl band” at the time, and took over as their music director. What started as a novelty act became a legitimate band under King’s leadership. He would travel the world with the group for a year before returning to Detroit in 1949, where King would take the gig at the Flame Show Bar in April 1950.

Wasserman “asked if I could put together a band to accompany national acts which would work every night of the week,” King said during a 1986 interview. “I told him I could, but the caliber of musicians I had in mind might cost a little more. He said, ‘Do it.’ I agreed on the condition that I would have control over the music and band personnel. I named the band after the state animal.” Maurice King and His Wolverines quickly earned a reputation for their tight playing and ability to back up any star, regardless of musical style.

That led to a record deal with Columbia Records, and in 1951, the band released "Good Daddy" with vocals by Flame Show Bar favorite LaVern Baker (then billed as Bea Baker) and “I'm Just a Shadow of Myself” with Johnny Ray. They’d also release several records for Columbia subsidiary Okeh and a few smaller labels.

King was the consummate professional, always fashionable and always punctual, never tolerating late-arriving performers. “He was an elegant bandleader, more like Duke Ellington,” trumpeter Johnny Trudell, who sometimes got the call to fill in at the Flame, told authors Jim Gallert and Lars Bjorn. “Everything was meticulous: his dress, his custom-made shoes, his custom-made everything. Total class, man. He was a great arranger, an orchestrator.”

King died of a heart attack at the Michigan Health Center in Detroit on Dec. 23, 1992. He was 81.

"He was a perfectionist," Knight told the Associated Press at the time of King’s death. "He helped to shape your entertainment future."

And he also helped to shape the Motown sound, because one of King’s many admirers in the crowd was a young man named Berry Gordy Jr., his future boss.

The Motown connection

“All the beautiful people came to life at night — the sharpest-dressed Black and white people I had ever seen — jewelry flashing, beautiful furs — something else,” Gordy wrote in “To Be Loved,” his autobiography. “John R Street was jumping with clubs like Sonny Wilson’s Garfield Lounge, the Chesterfield Lounge and, nearby, the Frolic Show Bar. But where you’d usually find me was down the street on the corner of John R and Canfield at the most popular of all, the Flame Show Bar.”

The Gordy family were frequent visitors to the Flame, not just because of the music, but because Gordy’s sisters Gwen and Anna operated a photography business in the club, snapping for-sale keepsakes for the patrons.

Gordy had dropped out of Northeastern High School at 17 to pursue a boxing career before entering the Army in 1951, where he completed his G.E.D. Following his time in the service, he opened the 3-D Record Mart, his first official foray into the music business, and yet, he was no stranger to it. When he was 13 or 14, Gordy won an honorable mention for his song "Berry's Boogie" in a boogie-woogie songwriting contest, and he frequently sent in material to the TV show "Songs for Sale" hoping to be discovered. He had studied music for a year and was said to have gotten good enough to jump in on a piano during a jam session in a pinch. His record store failed after two years, so Gordy went to work for Ford on a Mercury assembly line for $85 a week.

"Berry said he was going crazy on the production line," Esther Gordy Edwards told the Free Press for a May 15, 1983, story about her younger brother. "To keep his sanity, he created songs in his head - he was creating all the time." Luckily for him, the aspiring songwriter was in the right city and at the right nightclub.

"Just to look at Berry, you couldn't tell there was anything special about him," King recalled years later. "He used to dress neatly and nicely, and he'd come around the club and you'd smile from the stand when you were looking at him. He was a songwriter, and there were several of them around. There was nothing too different about him. You just couldn't predict he'd become the guy he's become today."

In 1957, the story goes, Gordy was hanging out at the Flame Show where he learned that local talent manager Al Green (not the famous soul singer) was looking for songs for an up-and-coming singer named Jackie Wilson. Wilson had been singing with a group called The Dominoes but had decided to strike out on his own. As a teenager, Wilson had recorded a record in 1952 for Dizzy Gillespie's label Dee Gee, a cover of "Danny Boy" under the name Sonny Wilson, but it didn't go anywhere. Green knew that Wilson had all the makings of a star - except for good original material.

Gordy and Wilson knew each other, as the two had boxed against each other back in the 1940s, and Gwen Gordy introduced her brother to Green. Gordy came up with the song "Reet Petite (The Finest Girl You Ever Want To Meet)," which caught the fancy of Nat Tarnopol, a Detroit native who had become Wilson's manager. It would be released by Brunswick Records in August 1957 and hit No. 11 on the R&B chart two months later. Gordy provided Wilson with two more songs, "I'll Be Satisfied" and "That's Why (I Love You So)," which also became hits for the singer known as “Mr. Excitement.” A year later, in 1958, the Gordy-penned “Lonely Teardrops” launched Wilson on a path to mega stardom - and royalties from it would help Gordy get Motown up and running. While working with Wilson and Tarnopol, Gordy also met a young 17-year-old singer named William "Smokey" Robinson, who had auditioned for Tarnopol at Brunswick. The label passed on the group, but Gordy knew ‘Smoke’ had something special. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Flame is extinguished

The 1960s arrived, and with it came changes at the Flame and changes in musical taste and city planning.

For starters, Wasserman had become ill and moved to California in 1961 to escape Michigan winters. It’s unclear whether he sold the bar before he left, but either way, Wasserman died Sept. 22, 1962, in San Diego after a heart attack at age 61.

When Wasserman left Detroit, King left the bar. He would be replaced by a trio featuring organist Earl Van Dyke - the future bandleader of Motown’s revered Funk Brothers - and sax player George Benson. Yet, the era of the show bar was nearing an end, as the concert experience was shifting away from intimate affairs to larger venues.

On top of that, white leaders in the city had targeted the Black neighborhoods of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom for “urban renewal.” The Detroit Medical Center urban renewal plan was announced in 1958, calling for the redevelopment of 250 acres around what was then four of Detroit’s existing hospitals, supported by a ring of medical-related support buildings. The area identified for this transformation was bounded by Mack, Warren and Woodward avenues and the newly created Chrysler Freeway (Interstate-375), and included the site of the Flame.

The grand plan was the vision of the Arden-Campbell Co., whose principals had worked on the development of shopping centers and the Westland and Northland malls. In all, the developer planned 16 buildings across 15.4 acres. There were to be three 12-story, one seven-story, and one single-story medical office buildings, five one-story retail buildings, two general office buildings, and four parking facilities. The price tag for the project was $25 million, the equivalent of about $262 million in 2024 valuation, when adjusted for inflation.

The term “urban renewal” has come to be recognized as a negative one in more modern times. The areas targeted for these projects were almost always lower-income and predominately Black. This is because African Americans were often discriminated against and forced into the least desirable, oldest and most rundown parts of cities and were often forbidden from moving elsewhere by racially motivated housing policies. The area where the Medical Center urban renewal program was slotted for was part of Detroit’s mostly Black Paradise Valley neighborhood, which white city leaders deemed “a slum.”

Indeed, these urban redevelopment programs were carried out under Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, and were known as “Slum Clearance and Development.” The federal program funded local governments to buy land in “rundown areas” and then clear them of “blighted” buildings in order to repackage the lots for redevelopment by private companies. To the east of downtown, part of Black Bottom was razed for what is now known as Lafayette Park. What wasn’t replaced by new, gleaming Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed luxury living was buried under I-375.

Among the many victims to fall under the Medical Center “urban renewal” program was the famed Gotham Hotel - the city’s most renowned Black hotel - and the Flame Show Bar.

The final shows held at the Flame appear to have been headlined by George Benson, a run that ended on July 28, 1963. The building would sit empty for the next year and a half. Finally, on March 17, 1965, a demolition permit was issued for the iconic venue.

A moratorium on federal funding in 1974 turned off the tap for urban renewal projects, and with that, the Detroit Medical Center plan fizzled out. Out of the 16 buildings envisioned by Arden-Campbell, only the two buildings that were part of the Professional Plaza ever came to fruition. However, the DMC would embark on a number of new buildings and parking garages for its hospital complex. The rest of the land just was simply vacant. This was not only detrimental to the street wall and density of the area, but made the loss of the community that was bulldozed all the more painful. These blocks, this center of Black life in Detroit, were cleared for nothing.

A parking garage for the Detroit Medical Center sits on the site of the Flame Show Bar today.