LOS ANGELES — Jheryl Busby, a music executive who led a revival of Motown Rec ords while president and chief executive of the company from 1988 to 1995, was found dead Tuesday in a hot tub at his home in Malibu. He was 59.
“It appears it could be a possible accident or he died of natural causes,” Ed Winter, Los Angeles County assistant coroner chief, said Wednesday.
An autopsy is planned.
Busby got his start in the music business doing promotional work for Stax Records in the early 1970s.
“I thought it was such a great job,” Busby told The Washington Post in 1991. “It was going in stores, educating the store owner on what records you had coming out and trying to get merchandise space. It was mom-and- pop stores … and your job was putting up the posters and creating a buzz on records.”
He was so successful at stirring up interest in his label’s acts that he quickly moved on to promotional and artist-development roles at Casablanca, Atlantic, CBS and A&M Records.
At his next stop, MCA Records, Busby rose to become president of the company’s black-music division by 1984. He made a priority of signing established performers such as Patti LaBelle and Gladys Knight who had lost their record-company deals in the post-disco era.
He also helped discover and market such groups as New Edition, Jody Watley, Bobby Brown, and the Jets, helping them cross over from the R&B music charts to the more mainstream top-40 lists. Along the way, he turned MCA into the industry’s black-music sales leader.
Then in 1988, he was hired at the declining Motown. Busby took over as president and chief executive, gaining a 10 percent ownership stake in the process.
“I thought it couldn’t get any better: president and CEO of probably the most important record label in America in terms of black music,” he later told The New York Times.
Building on stalwarts Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder, Busby brought Diana Ross back to the label after several years away. Then he started developing new acts, including Boyz II Men, Queen Latifah and Johnny Gill.
Busby’s magic touch was evident. In 1990, Motown had five songs reach No. 1 on the R&B charts, and sales of the company’s LPs jumped from No. 10 to No. 4 on the R&B album charts.
“I had tremendous respect for the way he continued the Motown legacy,” singer-songwriter Smokey Robinson, who had a string of Motown hits starting in the 1960s, said Tuesday in a statement.
Busby was forced out in 1995 after a legal dispute with MCA. Three years later, he was named head of the urban-music division at Dreamworks SKG.
In 2004, he founded Def Soul Classics Records, signing standbys LaBelle and the Isley Brothers, and two years later he continued his partnership with LaBelle by starting Umbrella Recordings.
Busby also became a majority stakeholder in Founders National Bank, the first black- owned and -operated commercial bank in California, in 1998. He remained a backer after several mergers with other black-owned banks and, at the time of his death, was vice chairman of OneUnited Bank.
