By 1963, Berry Gordy and company were fine-tuning Motown’s sound. Jumping on the charts were Martha & The Vandellas, with “Come And Get These Memories” and “Heat Wave,” signaling the emergence of the writing/production team Holland-Dozier-Holland. “Little” Stevie Wonder was No.1 with the record-breaking “Fingertips (Part 2).” Mary Wells’ “You Lost The Sweetest Boy” and “What’s Easy For Two Is So Hard For One” turned out to be a double-sided hit. The Supremes (finally!) made their Top 40 chart debut.

All of these songs, and so many more, are included on this third volume of The Complete Motown Singles.

This five-CD set captures the hits and the misses during the label’s fifth year of existence. It features the A-side and B-side of every single released by Motown and its subsidiaries during the high-growth phase of Detroit’s entertainment juggernaut. Over the course of the set’s 119 tracks, you can hear The Chuck-A-Lucks and Jack Haney & “Nikiter” Armstrong with a couple of Cold War novelties, Martha & The Vandellas following one hit natural disaster (“Heat Wave”) with another (“Quicksand”), and an outstanding Holland-Dozier-Holland production (The Marvelettes’ “Locking Up My Heart”) that should have been a much bigger hit than it was. Leaving the fold were the Workshop Jazz, Divinity and Miracle labels; new to the company was the V.I.P. imprint.

The set is bound in a scaled-down 78-rpm-era “album,” with cardboard sleeves to hold each of the discs, and 92 pages of rare photos, detailed annotations and scholarly – as well as personal – liner notes. It also features a reproduction 45-rpm single from its era; in this case, it’s Martha & The Vandellas’ “(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave” b/w “A Love Like Yours (Don’t Come Knockin’ Every Day).” Martha Reeves contributes a personal essay to the set detailing the artist’s-eye-view of life in the label’s early years. Also included is an historical overview by author and scholar Craig Werner, and, as in previous volumes, copious track-by-track annotations painstakingly researched by noted authors and discographers Bill Dahl and Keith Hughes.

The Complete Motown Singles, Volume 3: 1963 is a limited-edition set. Most of the songs contained on it are unavailable anywhere else; many had never been re-released on vinyl, let alone on compact disc. When the edition is sold out, it’s gone for good, so act now.

Volume 3 is the third in a proposed 12-part series; Volume 4 will follow early in 2006.