![]() By her third album, 1980's gold Irons in the Fire, Marie was doing most of her own writing and producing. 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. 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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