But Raby, founder and musical director of “A Motown Christmas,” doesn’t mind the hard work when it’s doing something he’s loved since he was a child: music.

“I used to have a little record player when I was 4,” he said during a telephone interview from his home near Detroit. “My uncle used to take me down to the local five-and-dime to buy records.”

The first record he ever bought was Little Richard’s 1959 album “Tutti Frutti.”

Music became a pastime, love and eventually his vocation as he lived and worked in Detroit, home of Motown Records founded by Berry Gordy.

Over the years, Raby was musical director for some of Motown’s best acts: Martha and the Vandellas (“Dancing in the Street”), various forms of The Temptations (“My Girl”), The Miracles (“The Tracks of My Tears”), and he spent 15 years with The Contours (“Do You Love Me”).

“My tenure with The Contours was coming to an end, and I was looking for another project,” he recalled. “It started out as a holiday show. I reached out to different artists from different Motown acts that I had worked with over the years and I felt we had good chemistry.”

They agreed to sign on to the holiday show, calling themselves the Motortown All-Stars. He added an orchestra with top-notch veteran musicians, most of whom played with him during his Contour days. The first show was staged in 2013.

For most of those nine years, the lineup was virtually the same, he said, although one of its members, David Finley, who had also been a 40-year member of The Miracles, died in 2020.

Today, the average age for most of the group is in their 60s, many of whom he said were the “second generation to a lot of these acts.” But don’t let the age fool you, he said. Groups that came to maturity in the Motown heyday were professionals who could perform onstage, i.e., without a backtrack to high flubs or out-of-tune notes.

Raby said he was lucky to put the lineup together for what he says will be 35 shows this year, mostly during the holiday season.

“I’ve worked with enough artists over the years that it was easy to find them,” Raby said. “The hard thing was to find people that are the right fit. It’s fairly easy to find a lot of them that are able to sing and dance, but I think that when you have good chemistry, it shows. The audience feels it and sees it. And it’s really important for us to really be enjoying what we do.”

For “A Motown Christmas,” Raby is promising tunes that will take the audience down a musical memory lane by highlighting Motown’s Golden Age of the early to late 1960s. About one-third of the show will be classic Motown songs, “many of them from groups our members are or were a part of,” he said.

They will also perform classic holiday songs, while the rest will be holiday songs performed with “a Motown twist.”

However, don’t expect the entire Motown catalog to be part of the set list.

“We all started throwing ideas around on what songs we wanted to do,” he said, “and we quickly ended up with about 100 songs, which would have been a five- or six-hour show.”

That’s why the focus is on the Golden Age of Motown, which is the time of some of Motown’s biggest hits.

“It’s always gratifying to see the multi-generational fans of this music,” he said. “Even if people don’t know the artists, they know the songs. And they’ve been played so much, and in so many places, they’ve stood the test of time. So it’s always great to see that.”

He said they sometimes have young people come to the autograph table, and he asks them if they knew the songs during the show.

“And it’s amazing. They really do,” he said.

“A Motown Christmas” is a holiday card to Motown fans.

“For the people that grew up with this music, we want them to remember what it was like and take that trip down memory lane,” he said. “And for the people that weren’t part of that generation, we want them to enjoy classic songs that never really have gone out of style. And for all of those that enjoy the holiday season, we want them to walk out thinking they’ve had a really good time.”

Crystal Schelle is an award-winning journalist whose work has been published locally, regionally and nationally. She enjoys trivia, cats and streaming movies.