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Jack Ashford was born in Philadelphia on May 18, 1934, and spent his childhood moving between relatives’ homes because his mother did not own a house. He found stability at the Granoff School of Music, where he studied the vibraphone and its demanding four-mallet technique, and by 1953 he was touring Providence, Rhode Island, with an R&B group called the Hamiltons. Motown brought him to Detroit in 1963 to join the Funk Brothers as a multi-percussionist, playing marimba, bells, chimes, cabasa, woodblock and even a snapped hotel sheet for sharp, short transients.

His tambourine drove Nowhere to Run, Going to a Go-Go, I Heard It Through the Grapevine and You Can’t Hurry Love, while his jazz-shaped vibes, influenced by Milt Jackson and Lionel Hampton, floated through Ooh Baby Baby, Where Did Our Love Go and What’s Going On. He later founded Pied Piper and Just Productions in Detroit with Lorraine Chandler, moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, played on Mighty Clouds of Joy gospel records and released a solo album before retiring to Detroit in the early 1980s.

• The episode singles out his tambourine on Edwin Starr’s War as the militant engine of the protest anthem.
• He wrote a song called Char for his wife Charlene, a retired schoolteacher who helped him write his 2003 autobiography, Motown: The View from the Bottom.
• In 2014 he played on Put Your Needle Down, the second album by the Secret Sisters.
• The Funk Brothers received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, and Ashford attended their Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony with guitarist Eddie Willis.
• After Joe Messina died in April 2022, Ashford became the last surviving member of the 13 core Funk Brothers.