Joe Hunter was the leader of the most famous band whose names nobody knew.

The Funk Brothers were the tight-knit group of anonymous in-house Motown session musicians who played on every great record released by the label from the early 1960s until 1972, when the company abandoned its Detroit birthplace and moved operations to California. His piano playing was part of the bedrock of the early Motown sound, and you could fill a jukebox with the hit records on which he played, from Marvin Gaye’s Pride and Joy to Martha and the Vandellas’ Heat Wave.

He left the label in 1964 but by then he had helped to create the Motown sound and played his part in changing the face of popular music. In later years, he worked in clubs around Detroit, playing blues, R&B and jazz. But his story enjoyed an unexpected happy ending when in 2002 an acclaimed film about the Funk Brothers led to the surviving members emerging from anonymity and reforming to tour and record and winning Grammy awards.

Joseph Edward Hunter was born in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1927 and although his family moved north to Detroit when he was 10, he never lost his southern accent or manners. His mother was a piano teacher and he learnt to play initially by watching her give lessons but started playing seriously in jazz bands in the US Army, where his fellow musicians included the drummer Elvin Jones and Earl Van Dyke, whom he would later recruit to the Funk Brothers.

After his discharge, Hunter returned to Detroit, playing jazz and R&B in local clubs during the week and playing the organ in churches on Sundays.

In 1956 his earthy, down-home piano playing landed him a job backing the R&B singer Hank Ballard, whose hits included Work with Me Annie and the original version of The Twist. He also backed the singer Jackie Wilson and in 1958 was recruited by Berry Gordy, an up and coming local songwriter and producer, who had heard him playing in a Detroit club called Little Sam’s.

Hunter became the first musi-can Gordy employed when he started his Motown Records and his playing was key to Motown’s first trio of hits, Marv Johnson’s Come to Me (1959) and Money by Barrett Strong and the Miracles’ Shop Around the following year.

As Motown’s success grew, Hunter became full-time and Gordy asked him to assemble an in-house band of the city’s top musicians. They became informally known as the Funk Brothers and worked in the tiny Motown studio they affectionately called the “Snake Pit” five and often six days a week, turning out hit records in a fashion modelled on Gordy’s experience as a young man working on the Ford car production line.

Other hits that Hunter played on included Do You Love Me, a million seller for the Contours in 1962, Heat Wave, a huge hit for Martha and the Vandellas in 1963 and Pride and Joy, Marvin Gaye’s first Top Ten hit that same year.

The sound Hunter and his colleagues created on such records came to be known as soul and it offered a bright, self-confident musical accompaniment to the social changes that meant African-Americans leaving behind the dark days of sharecropping and segregation and moving into the “say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud” era.

It was a sound that would also help to make Motown the most successful black-owned business in American history, although the musicians themselves saw scant reward. Older and less good-looking than the singing stars Gordy discovered, they were deliberately kept in the background: Motown marketed itself as “the sound of young America” and a bunch of grizzled session players in their thirties — considered certifiably ancient in the pop world at the time — hardly fitted the image.

Frustrated by the restrictions of session work and by Gordy’s less than generous rates of pay, Hunter left Motown at the beginning of 1964 to work as a freelance arranger and pianist, his friend Earl Van Dyke taking over leadership of the band. Hunter went on to work with Jimmy Ruffin, Jimmy McCrack-lin, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Junior Parker and Edwin Starr among others and in later years returned to playing in bars and clubs around Detroit.

But there was to be a final twist to the story when author and film-maker Allan Slutsky set out to find the anonymous musicians who had created the Motown sound. He discovered Hunter playing for tips at the Marriott Hotel, Detroit, where guests had no idea who he was. Slutsky’s acclaimed 2002 film Standing in the Shadows of Motownpersuaded Hunter and other surviving Motown musicians to reform the Funk Brothers. The soundtrack album from the film won two Grammys in 2003 and the following year Hunter and his colleagues were back at the Grammys to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. He toured with the Funk Brothers and had returned from playing in London at Ronnie Scott’s club only a week before he died.

“It makes me really happy that I got to see Joe get his place in the sun and get a little bit of his dream,” Slutsky said on the news of his death.

He published an autobiography, Musicians, Motown and Myself in 1996. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Joe Hunter, pianist and band leader, was born on November 19, 1927. He died on February 2, 2007, aged 79