Florence Ballard contains the line "Remember the sadness in Florence Ballard's eyes". On his 2006 album "Hip Hop is Dead", hip-hop artist Nas mentions the Ballard/Ross rivalry in his song "Blunt Ashes": ""When Flo from the Supremes died/Diana Ross cried/Many people said that she was laughing inside."" In his short story "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band", Stephen King, through the late disc jockey Alan Freed, includes Ballard as one of the deceased artists who performs in a town called "Rock and Roll Heaven". "Dreamgirls", a 1981 Broadway musical, chronicles a fictional group called "The Dreams," and a number
Florence Ballard Bessemer, Alabama; after his grandmother was shot and killed, he was adopted by the Ballard family. Jesse Ballard left his adoptive parents at 13, and soon engaged in an affair with Ballard's mother, who was only 14, in Rosetta. The Ballards moved to Detroit in 1929. Jesse soon worked at General Motors. Jesse, an amateur musician, helped instigate Florence's interest in singing; he taught her various songs and accompanied her on guitar. Financial difficulties forced the Ballard family to move to different Detroit neighborhoods; by the time Florence turned 15 they had settled at Detroit's Brewster-Douglass housing projects, and the