"The Happening" signals the end of an era: it's the final
Supremes single to feature
Florence Ballard, the gifted but troubled singer pushed out of the spotlight by Motown brass in favor of
Diana Ross.
more...
Ballard, who co-founded the Supremes with Ross, Mary Wilson and Betty McGlown, was featured on early Motown singles like "Buttered Popcorn," but after the group first reached the Top 40 in 1963 with "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes," Ross was permanently installed as lead singer. The classic Supremes lineup of Ross, Ballard and Wilson went on to record 10 number-one pop hits between 1964 and 1967, culminating in "The Happening," cut for the Columbia Pictures comedy of the same name.
Veteran Hollywood composer Frank De Vol, the movie's musical director, co-wrote "The Happening" with Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland, the Supremes' longtime writing/producing team. De Vol supervised a Los Angeles recording of the instrumental track that Holland, Dozier and Holland found unusable: "The L.A. rhythm guys couldn't get what we wanted," Dozier later told Motown historian Brian Chin for The Complete Motown Singles | Vol. 7: 1967 box set.
"The Happening" was re-recorded from scratch in Motown's Studio A by members of the Funk Brothers, the label's stalwart session team, among them legendary bassist James Jamerson. "[‘The Happening'] was cut in Los Angeles with another bass player, but then they sent it back to Detroit to re-record the track. They felt it needed my dad," James Jamerson Jr. told Bass Player magazine in 2009. "The same thing happened later with the Temptations' ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone.' The producers at Motown in L.A. began to think that way: ‘What would this song sound like if we put Jamerson on it?'"
"The Happening" topped the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1967, although the accompanying film flopped. But as Ballard spiraled deeper into depression and alcoholism, she began missing Supremes recording sessions and live performances, and when she showed up inebriated ahead of the trio's July 1 performance at Las Vegas' Flamingo Hotel, Motown head Berry Gordy Jr. ordered her to return to Detroit, and named as her full-time replacement Cindy Birdsong, formerly of Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles. Beginning with "Reflections," the follow-up to "The Happening," the group was officially renamed Diana Ross and the Supremes.
Ballard, meanwhile, signed to ABC Records as a solo act, but her career fizzled, and she died of a heart attack in 1976 at the age of 32. "It was so obvious that the public loved her," Wilson wrote in her memoir, Dreamgirl. "Yet that just wasn't enough." 
