Stuart Cosgrove - Harlem 69: The Future of Soul

Winner of the Penderyn Music Book Prize, 2018

Mojo Books of the Year #4, 2017

Shindig Book of the Year, 2017

Offers us a map of Memphis in that most revolutionary of years, 1968. Music writing as both crime reporting and political commentary.

The Herald

Stuart Cosgroves whole life has been shaped by soul first as a music journalist and now as a chronicler of black American musics social context.

Peter Ross, Sunday Herald

A trilogy of books by Stuart Cosgrove will become a vast tale of three cities, melding two of his great passions, soul music and American history. In Memphis 68 he continues his compelling account of the last tumultuous years of the 1960s as the decade of love shuddered to a halt in cities ablaze with civil unrest, race riots and political assassination.

Sunday Post

Its perfectly feasible that Stuart Cosgroves exhaustive, but briskly readable trilogy of social, political and musical histories of Black America in the late 1960s will go on to become deserved future classics... Cosgroves selection of his subjects is unerring, and clearly rooted in personal passion... The substance of the book is forensic and journalistic, but Cosgrove masks his wealth of detail beneath an authorial voice which is as easily, blissfully evocative as a classic soul seven-inch.

David Pollock, The List

This is a book that grabs you from the off... If Detroit 67 was the first part of a three-act play, then Memphis 68 fulfils the role of the second act, where things get worse before they can get better, setting the scene perfectly for the denouement... There are few writers who so clearly and powerfully evince the relationship between popular culture and politics as he is doing with these books. Harlem 69 cant come quickly enough.

Alistair Braidwood

Highly recommended! Astounding body of learning. Future classic. Go!

SoulSource.co.uk

As ever, Cosgroves lucid, entertaining prose is laden with detail, but never at the expense of the wider narrative. Hinging on that Memphis destination, he traces the savage dichotomy at the citys heart: it was the site of multi-racial soul imprint Stax, but also the place where Martin Luther King was killed. A heartbreaking but essential read, and one that feels remarkably timely.

Clash Magazine, Best Books of 2017

Cosgrove weaves a compelling web of circumstance that maps a city struggling with the loss of its youth to the Vietnam War, the hard edge of the civil rights movement and ferocious inner-city rioting. His prose is dense, not the kind that readers looking for a quick tale about singers they know and love might take to, but a proper music journalists tome redolent of the field research that he carried out in Detroits public and academic libraries. It is rich in titbits gathered from news reports. It is to be consumed rather than to be dipped into, a whole-hearted evocation of people and places filled with the confidence that it is telling a tale set at a fulcrum of American social and cultural history.

The Independent

Broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove lifts the lid on the time when the fight for civil rights and clash of cultures and generations came together in an incendiary mix.

Daily Record

The set-up sparks like the finest pulp thriller. A harsh winter has brought the city to its knees. The car factories are closed and Motown major domo Berry Gordy is fighting to keep his empire afloat. Stuart Cosgroves immaculately researched account of a year in the life of the Motor City manages a delicate balancing act. While his love for the era particularly the music, best exemplified by the dominance of Motown, whose turbulent twelve months are examined in depth is clear, he maintains a dispassionate, journalistic distance that gives his epic narrative authority and depth. *****

The Skinny

A gritty portrait of the year Motown unravelled... Detroit 67 is a wonderful book and a welcome contribution to both the history of soul music and the history of Detroit.

Spiked

A thoroughly researched and fascinating insight into the music and the times of a city which came to epitomise the turmoil of a nation divided by race and class, while at the same time offering it an unforgettable, and increasingly poignant, soundtrack... By using his love of the music as a starting point he has found the perfect way to explore further themes and ideas.

Alistair Braidwood

The subhead for Stuart Cosgroves Detroit 67 is the year that changed soul. But this thing contains multitudes, and digs in deep, well beyond just the citys music industry in that fateful year... All of this is written about with precision, empathy, and a great, deep love for the city of Detroit.

Detroit Metro Times

The story is unbelievably rich. Motown, the radical hippie underground, a trigger-happy police force, Vietnam, a disaffected young black community, inclement weather, The Supremes, the army, strikes, fiscal austerity, murders all these elements coalesced, as Cosgrove noted, to create a remarkable year.

In fact, as the book gathers pace, one cant help think how the hell did this city survive it all? In fact such is the depth and breadth of his research, and the skill of his pen, at times you actually feel like you are in Berry Gordys oce watching events unfurl like an unstoppable James Jamerson bass line. I was going to call this a great music book. Certainly, it contains some of the best ever writing and insight about Motown. Ever. But its huge canvas and backdrop, its rich social detail, negate against such a description.

Detroit 67 is a great and a unique book, full stop.

Paolo Hewitt, Caught by the River

Big daddy of soul books... Over twelve month-by-month chapters, the author a TV executive and northern soul fanatic weaves a thoroughly researched, epic tale of musical intrigues and escalating social violence.

TeamRock

As the title suggests, this is a story of twelve months in the life of a city... Leading black music label Motown is at the heart of the story, and 1967 is one of Motowns more turbulent years, but its set against the backdrop of growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, police brutality, a disaffected black population, rioting, strikes in the Big Three car plants and what seemed like the imminent breakdown of society... Detroit 67 is full of detailed information about music, politics and society that engages you from beginning to end. You finish the book with a real sense of a city in crisis and of how some artists reflected events.

Socialist Review

A fine telling of a pivotal year in soul music

Words and Guitars

Two young kids stand in the doorway of 2026 Seventh Avenue in Harlem at the offices of the Black Panther Party, where breakfast programmes fed local children. The doorway is now that of Jennys Food Corporation, which sells chicken wings and French fries, and the address is 2026 Adam Clayton Jr Boulevard.

The Future of Soul

STUART COSGROVE