Motown songwriter Janie Bradford Hobbs has died

Janie Bradford Hobbs, a songwriter whose name sits on one of the first records Motown had a real hit with, has died. SoulBounce reported her death on August 27, 2026, filing it under the site's long running obituary column. She was born in 1939.

Her best known credit is Money (That's What I Want), the song she co-wrote with Berry Gordy that gave the young Detroit operation an early commercial breakthrough and went on to be recorded by a long list of other acts. It is the kind of credit that outlives almost everything else a writer does.

Hobbs spent much of her working life inside the label rather than at arm's length from it, which was common for the first generation of Motown staff, where the boundary between writer, receptionist and administrator was thin and people moved across it.

SoulBounce's notice was brief and pointed readers toward fuller accounts elsewhere, including uDiscover Music, AllMusic and Discogs entries for her catalogue. No cause of death was given in the material available at the time of publication.

Her death arrives during a run of losses across the same generation of American music. This site has already reported that Motown songwriter Janie Bradford died at 87, and separately that Harvey Stone, the longtime KBLX radio executive, has died.

Anyone reading back through the rnb-soul catalogue she helped build will find her name in places it is easy to miss, because songwriting credits from that period tend to be recorded once and then quoted from secondhand sources for decades afterward.