They Heard ‘Hit’ Through the Grapevine : Pop Music: Dozens of Motown hits came from the pens of Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield. The songwriters will be given a lifetime achievement award tonight.

There’s modesty and there’s modesty . Barrett Strong fell into the latter category as he looked back on the many songs he and former partner Norman Whitfield wrote as Motown staff writers during the Detroit soul label’s ‘60s heyday.

“We wrote maybe 300 songs and we had 12 good ones,” Strong, 49, said, speaking from his home in a Detroit suburb. “So 288 were bad ones.”

Pop music historians--and the charts--would beg to differ, not just with his dismissal of the vast majority of his catalogue, but with his terming the dozen best as merely “good.”

“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” . . . “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” . . . “Just My Imagination.” . . . All rank among pop music’s classics, as close to timeless as the form gets.

The team’s songs, originally recorded by Motown acts including Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Jackson 5, have been recorded by acts ranging from the Rolling Stones to the California Raisins. As a body of work, the Whitfield-Strong oeuvre nearly rivals that of Motown’s other great team, Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Whitfield and Strong are being honored tonight with a lifetime achievement award at the National Academy of Songwriters’ annual “Salute to the American Songwriter” concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. The two also will perform a medley of their hits--the first time they’ve worked together in the 20 years since Whitfield moved to Los Angeles.

Whitfield and Strong first teamed in 1960, when Motown was getting off the ground. Both were just out of high school. Strong was 17 when he was introduced to Motown founder Berry Gordy by singer Jackie Wilson, whom Gordy managed.

At 18 he had a hit, singing his own song “Money,” which was later recorded by the Beatles. But he was more interested in writing than performing, and Gordy put him and producer-writer Whitfield together. Along with Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson, Whitfield and Strong virtually invented a sound that is still one of the most influential in pop music.

“I guess you could say we invented it,” he said, giving credit for his songs’ distinctive arrangements and productions to Whitfield. “But we were quite young then and just doing something we hoped would work out, and it did. It was all teamwork, a family.”

His real family--he has five children--is what kept Strong in the Detroit area when Motown and Whitfield moved to Hollywood 20 years ago. In the mid-’70s he made a belated, unsuccessful second stab at his own singing career, recording an album for Capitol.

“I don’t know if you could say I was trying to make it as a singer,” he said. “I’m a creative person and tried to see what would happen. It didn’t happen.”

Since then he’s focused his time on his family, though he still treats Detroit’s young musicians as his extended family, working with local artists.

“I don’t think most of them see me as a father figure--I’m not an old-looking guy,” he said. “But some of the guys I’m working with are into the older singers and they look at me as someone who can teach them something. And I look at them as having something new they can teach me.”

In a break from his modest demeanor, Strong said that little in today’s music compares to his Motown work: “There is nothing good out there anymore. There are great songs, but for solid R&B; songs with the pop blend, there aren’t enough good ones. Everything is more technology oriented. You don’t have to be a good musician these days. People still enjoy that Motown sound: good solid songs, good singing and real musicians.”