It Must Be Magic turned out to be her last album for Motown, which she had a nasty legal battle with. That album boasted the major hit "I Need Your Lovin'," and Marie went gold again with her next album, It Must Be Magic (which included the major hit "Square Biz"). But to many of the black R&B fans who were eating her music up, it really didn't matter - the bottom line was she was a first-rate soul singer whose love of black culture ran deep.īy her third album, 1980's gold Irons in the Fire, Marie was doing most of her own writing and producing. When her second album, Lady T, came out, much of the R&B world was shocked to see how fair-skinned she was. That LP, which boasted her hit duet with James, "I'm Just a Sucker for Your Love," didn't show Marie's picture - so many programmers at black radio just assumed she was black. It was at Motown that she met her mentor and paramour-to-be, Rick James, who ended up doing all of the writing and producing for her debut album of 1979, Wild and Peaceful. The singer/songwriter/producer was in her early twenties when, around 1977, she landed a job at Motown Records. Marie grew up in west Los Angeles in a neighborhood that was nicknamed "Venice Harlem" because of its heavy black population. No white artist sang R&B more convincingly than Teena Marie, whose big, robust vocals were so black-sounding that when she was starting out, some listeners wondered if she was a light-skinned African-American.
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