I have been a Florence Ballard fan forever,but never really started doing research until I saw Dreamgirls ,but I wanted to share with you , The story of the lost supreme,

Florence Glenda Ballard Chapman, nicknamed “Flo” and “Blondie” (June 30, 1943 – February 22, 1976), was one of the co-founders The SupremesIn 1976, Ballard died of a coronary thrombosis at the age of thirty-two. Her death has been called “one of rock’s greatest tragedies”.[Ballard was born in Detroit, Michigan  to Jessie Ballard and his wife, Lurlee Wilson. Florence, whom friends and family often called “Flo,” was the eighth of fifteen children. She developed a love of music at an early age.  Soon she was singing solo at churches and other functions .  She became friends with Mary Wilson, after they performed in the same talent competition. Milton Jenkins, then best known for his work with the The Primes (who would go on to form The Temptations), took an interest in Ballard’s voice. In 1959, Jenkins arranged an audition for Ballard before The Primes’s Paul Williams and Eddie Kendricks. Impressed by Ballard’s polished performance, Jenkins decided The Primes would have a sister group called The Primettes, of which Ballard and Williams’ girlfriend, Betty McGlown, would be the first members.  Ballard invited Mary Wilson to join The Primettes. Later, Diane Ross was recruited. In 1960 McGlown would be replaced by Detroit teenager Barbara Martin; in 1961, Martin would leave the group to start a family.In the summer of 1960 after leaving a sock hop at Detroit’s Graystone Ballroom , Ballard was accidentally separated from her brother Billy, and accepted a ride home from a young man she felt she recognized, a local high-school basketball player named Reginald Harding,who drove her  to an empty parking lot off of Woodward Avenue. There, Harding raped Ballard at knife point.After weeks of  silence, Ballard finally told her groupmates what had happened to her. Ballard’s assault was never mentioned again.

The Supremes in 1965/66. Left to right: Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard.

Ballard, Ross, Wilson, and Martin shared leads on the Primettes’ songs,  The Primetteswould eventually sign to the Motown label as The Supremes, a name chosen by Ballard, on January 15, 1961. The group would eventually become a trio. Florence sang lead on the second Supremes single, “Buttered Popcorn.” According to Mary Wilson, Ballard’s voice was so loud that she was made to stand up to seventeen feet away from her microphone during recording sessions, while the other two Supremes stood directly in front of their microphones. Ballard also briefly toured with The Marvelettes as a replacement for Wanda Young, who was out on maternity leave.Diana Ross was made lead singer  in late 1963, because Berry Gordy believed that Ross’ voice, would help the group cross over to white audiences. Assigned to work with Holland-Dozier-Holland, Ross, Ballard, and Mary Wilson released ten number-one US pop hits between 1964 and 1967. In 1966, just prior to opening at the Copacabana supper clubin New York City, Ballard complained of a sore throat and asked that she not rehearse  to save her voice for the performance. That began a decline between Gordy and Ballard’s relationship. Over the next two years, Ballard and Gordy argued frequently, particularly as Ross became the group’s centerpiece. In early 1967, it was announced that the group’s name  would change to “Diana Ross & the Supremes”. As the year progressed, Ballard frequently missed public appearances,and  recording sessions. Gordy hired Cindy Birdsong, a singer with Patti LaBelle & the Blue Belles, to become Ballard’s permanent replacement. Ballard’s final performance with the group was their first appearance at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. She was sent home following the first show, after having stuck out her stomach from between the jacket and pants of her outfit. This behavior so outraged Gordy that he ordered her not to go onstage for the next show and ordered her to take the next plane home to Detroit. Listen as Flo describes the incidents surrounding her leaving……

Ballard married Thomas Chapman, on February 29, 1968, and signed with ABC Records in March 1968,  after negotiating her release from Motown. Ballard’s attorney received a one-time payment of $139,804.94 in royalties and earnings from Motown for her six-year tenure with the label.Billed as “Florence ‘Flo’ Ballard” She released the singles “It Doesn’t Matter How I Say It (It’s What I Say That Matters)” and “Love Ain’t Love” on ABC Records. The singles failed to chart, and  her musical career went into a rapid decline, and the $139,000 in settlement money was  depleted by their  management agency, Talent Management, Inc. This agency, was headed by Leonard Baun, an attorney Ballard would later fire and sue. Stipulations in Ballard’s contract with Motown prohibited Ballard from mentioning in any promotional materials or noting on the back of her album liner that she had ever been in the Supremes or recorded for Motown.

Ballard continued her efforts at a solo career. In 1968, she performed alongside Bill Cosby at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago ,rode on a float in The Bud Billiken Parade with comedian Godfrey Cambridge  was the featured personality of Detroit’s magazine, Detroit and  gave birth to twin girls, Michelle Chapman and Nicole Chapman, the first two of her three children. She performed at one of Richard Nixon’s inaugural balls in Washington, DC on January 20, 1969. In 1971, Ballard unsuccessfully sued Motown for additional royalty payments . In 1971, Ballard gave birth to her third child, Lisa Chapman. Soon after, Thomas Chapman left Ballard and her house was foreclosed. Over the next few years, Ballard laid low from all publicity. In 1974, Mary Wilson, who had maintained a rapport with Ballard over the years, invited Ballard to fly out to California to visit. The Supremes, with new member Scherrie Payne, were performing at Six Flags Magic Mountain, and Wilson invited Ballard on-stage to sing with the group. Ballard joined them on stage, but did not sing: instead, she played the tambourine. Although her on-stage appearance brought loud cheers from the crowd, Ballard told Wilson that she had no interest in continuing a career in music.Upon her return to Detroit, Ballard’s financial situation declined further. Uninterested in returning to show business, and with three children to support, she applied for welfare. This news and the story of her downward spiral hit the national newspapers.

The cover of the UK release The Supreme Florence Ballard. Despite most of the songs on the album originally being recorded for ABC Records in 1968, the cover photo is actually a Motown publicity photo from 1965. In 1975, Ballard received an insurance settlement from her former attorney’s insurance company. With the settlement money, Ballard purchased a small house on Shaftsbury Avenue in Detroit for herself and her children and made a decision to return to singing. Around this same time, Ballard also reconciled with her estranged husband. Backed by the female rock group The Deadly Nightshade, Ballard performed as a part of the Joan Little Defense League at a concert held at Detroit’s Henry and Edsel Ford Auditorium on June 25, 1975. Following the success of this performance, Ballard received requests for newspaper and television interviews, including an appearance on the local Detroit talk show The David Diles Show.

On February 21, 1976, Ballard entered Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital, complaining of numbness in her extremities. The next day, she died at 10:05 a.m. of coronary thrombosis, a blood clot in one of her coronary arteries. She was thirty-two years old. Ballard is buried in Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery located in Warren, Michigan. In the years following Florence Ballard’s death, Diana Ross established trust funds in the names of each of Ballard’s three children.  Motown head Berry Gordy paid for the funeral. In 2008, it was reported that Ballard’s daughters were still living in Detroit on welfare, and that that their trust funds were only $10,000 for each daughter, and that the funds were gone by the time the girls became of age. Florence Ballard: Forever Faithful!, a biography of Ballard written by Randall Wilson, was printed in 1999. In 2002, The Supreme Florence Ballard, which included all the tracks from the album she recorded for ABC Records in 1968, was released on CD by Spectrum, a London-based company. Another biography, The True Story of Florence Ballard, was published by Ballard’s sister Maxine Ballard in 2007. The book comes with a CD containing Flo’s last on-air interview, in which she shares her story behind her painful split from the group. The CD also contains a tribute from her sister, Maxine “Precious” Ballard. The latest and most complete biography of Flo, Peter Benjaminson’s The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard based on eight hours of interviews with Flo that Benjaminson and Flo tape recorded in 1975, was released on April 1, 2008.