(Lawrence Hill Books) www.ipgbook.com

The sad story of Florence “Flo” Ballard, the one-time Supreme who died penniless at age 32, is one to fill anyone with disgust at the capricious, insensitive nature of the music business. Ballard’s story was mythologized in the musical Dreamgirls, but her alter ego in that story, “Effie White,” was at least alive at the show’s conclusion. There was to be no such happy-ever-after ending for Ballard.

Author Peter Benjaminson met Ballard during the last year of her life, while he was a reporter at the Detroit Free Press, and thus we get the story from her perspective, while her memories were fresh. For Ballard, the Supremes’ saga began going wrong when Diana Ross was singled out to perform nearly all of the group’s leads, and Ballard, unlike Mary Wilson, was unable to mask her frustration at being reduced to a backing singer. When she was fired, she got no “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” moment; instead, she signed papers giving her a minimal settlement she then contested for the rest of her life, unfortunately working with a series of lawyers who further ripped her off, spiraling down through alcoholism and a stay in a mental home before ending up on welfare in her final months (her death was due to coronary thrombosis).

Though Ballard’s story is admittedly short (post-Supremes, she only released two singles), you do wish Benjaminson had fleshed out the story further. Too often he summarizes events that could have been elaborated on, as when he describes how a post-Supremes Ballard made a “big splash” at Nixon’s inauguration in 1969, raising the question — how? In a book whose main text runs to only 179 pages, there’s certainly room for expansion. And the constant put-downs of every aspect of Ross’ behavior become tiresome. But Benjaminson does manage to clarify Ballard’s muddled legal tussles, and the excerpts from her legal documents provide a further cautionary tale for aspiring musicians. GILLIAN G. GAAR