Among the members of the closely knit clan who built the Motown label, one figure stands out in a photograph taken at a music industry awards dinner in New York in 1961. Posing at the centre of the group next to Berry Gordy Jr, the man who founded the company, is a slender, light-skinned African American woman in a short platinum-blond wig, evening gown and elbow-length white gloves. This was the former Raynoma Mayberry, then Raynoma Gordy, not only Berry’s second wife but one of the key figures behind the label that billed its hits as “the sound of young America”.

“Miss Ray”, who has died at the age of 79, helped nurture the company’s early artists, including Smokey Robinson, the future composer of hits from Shop Around to The Tracks of My Tears, who recalled how “she taught us new chords and simple ways to structure songs”. She also found the company its headquarters, the two-storey house on West Grand Boulevard that became known as Hitsville USA (now the Motown Museum), and helped Gordy set up and run his song-publishing company, Jobete Music, which was valued at more than $300m when EMI Music bought the catalogue in 2004.

Raynoma was born to Lucille and Ashby Mayberry and raised in Black Bottom, a Detroit ghetto, until her father’s income as a janitor at Cadillac’s headquarters enabled them to move to a better neighbourhood. At Cass technical school she played the viola in the school symphony orchestra. She also played the piano and the harp, studied theory, composition, harmony and arrangement, and sang in school and church choirs. Her first husband, Charles Liles, was a saxophonist; they married in 1955 and had a son, Cliff, divorcing after two years together.

She was performing with her sister Alice as a singing duo called Alice and Ray and it was after winning a talent contest at the Twenty Grand club in Detroit that they were introduced to Gordy. He granted them an audition at his house. By the time she tucked her son into bed that night, she remembered: “I already knew that Berry Gordy was going to be the great love of my life.”

He, in turn, was impressed by her perfect pitch and by her suggestions for improving musical arrangements, devising introductions and fleshing out harmonies. She and her sister became the nucleus of a group called the Teen Queens, later the Cute-Teens, for whom Gordy produced a single, From This Day Forward, leased to the Aladdin label in 1958. When Gordy released the first record on his Tamla label, Marv Johnson’s Come to Me, in the early weeks of 1959, there was a credit for the Rayber Voices, a backing choir that Raynoma had assembled and which would be heard on several early Motown records.

The Rayber Voices also accompanied Johnson during a week at the Apollo theatre in Harlem and, for one night, at Carnegie Hall. Miss Ray had become one of Gordy’s inner circle. They were married in 1960, a year after the birth of their son, Kerry.

In 1961 she produced Jimmy Ruffin’s debut single, Don’t Feel Sorry For Me, as the first release on Gordy’s new label, Miracle, whose slogan was perhaps not perfectly conceived: “If it’s a hit, it’s a Miracle!” That same year she released her only single for the label, the cute ballad When I Needed You, using the pseudonym Little Iva (a year before Eva Boyd recorded The Locomotion as Little Eva).

When Gordy’s affairs with other women ended the marriage and the details of the settlement were being worked out, she proposed setting up a branch of the publishing company in New York. After she had made the move, however, the necessary funds to support the operation were not forthcoming from Detroit. To cover costs and living expenses, she took a fateful decision to have 5,000 bootleg copies of Mary Wells’s hit My Guy pressed and sold unofficially. When Gordy discovered what she had done, he terminated their business relationship – although they remained on sufficiently good terms for him to lend her the money to start a new record label, Shrine, with her third husband, Ed Singleton, in Washington DC.

She and Singleton had two children, a son, Eddie Jr, and a daughter, Rya. The label failed, however, and she returned to Gordy’s fold in 1967. When her marriage to Singleton ended, Gordy delegated her to act as personal assistant to Diana Ross, his very demanding protege and lover. In the continuing soap opera of Gordy’s whims, they even lived together again for a while in the mid-70s, albeit on a largely platonic basis.

In 1982 Gordy briefly put her in charge of the creative department before funding a company called Super Three, through which she worked with some of Motown’s older artists but also produced a hit, Somebody’s Watching Me, for the young singer Rockwell – actually Kennedy Gordy, Berry’s son with Margaret Norton, the model who had succeeded Miss Ray in his affections in 1961.

Raynoma was fired in 1985, however, given two years’ money and allowed to take her own protege and lover, a singer named Sherrick, away with her; she signed him to Warner Bros and his first single, Just Call, was a hit in 1987 before his career vanished in a blizzard of cocaine. In 1989 she assisted the British disc jockey Ian Levine in his project to locate many of the original Motown artists, some of them long since sunk into obscurity, and get them back into a Detroit studio.

In her autobiography (Berry, Me and Motown, published in 1990) she made it clear that, like many artists and employees who had helped to create the Motown legend, she believed Gordy had not been equitable in his division of the profits that made him rich. The love of her life turned out, she wrote, to be “the thief of dreams”.

She is survived by her daughter and her three sons.

• Raynoma Singleton, singer, arranger, producer and music industry executive, born 8 March 1937; died 11 November 2016

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