Cosgrove - Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul

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... History is quick to romanticise Hitsville USA but Cosgrove is not quite so credulous, choosing to focus instead on the dark shadows at the heart of his gripping story. *****

The Skinny

Online reaction

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. With his follow-up, Memphis 68, on the way, Cosgrove is well set to add yet another string to his already well-strung bow, becoming a reliable chronicler of a neglected area of American culture, telling those stories which are still unknown to most

Alistair Braidwood

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 office 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

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

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

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. It is also the first in a trilogy by Cosgrove (Memphis 68 and Harlem 69). By the time you finish this, youll be eagerly awaiting the next book

Socialist Review

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

Spiked

A fine telling of a pivotal year in soul music

Words and Guitars

First published in Great Britain by the author in 2015.

This revised edition published in Great Britain in 2016 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH91QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright Stuart Cosgrove 2016

The right of Stuart Cosgrove to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders.

If any omissions have been made, the publisher will be happy to rectify these in future editions.

ISBN 978 1 84697 366 6

eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 334 1

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Typeset by 3btype.com

Printed by Clays Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

CONTENTS

HEART AND SOUL

I want to acknowledge the help of those people who influenced Detroit 67 knowingly or otherwise: most of all my gratitude to the singers, songwriters, musicians and activists who shaped the highpoint of sixties soul. Over many years as a journalist frequently writing about soul music, I have met and interviewed many of the central characters in this book but would like to single out two. Mary Wilson of the Supremes, who I had the pleasure to interview at length live on stage at the Victorian and Albert Museum in London, and the late Jimmy Ruffin who shared with me his personal family perspectives about his father and brother; his accounts of his early life in the Deep South were moving in the extreme. I have tried to be as objective as possible about an era of music that has been the subject of wild myth-making and have tried throughout to see the complex events of 1967 in their context, rather than as a battle of good versus evil. Strange as it may seem there are very few books that touch on the story of Motown that have not tried to take sidesin the premature death of Florence Ballard. I have resisted taking sides and try wherever possible to see merit in all the key characters, even when their young emotions were driving them forward.

In researching this book, I have been able to mine a wealth of primary resources. I acknowledge several academic institutions, including the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, which has a world reputation for labour affairs and industrial history. My thanks to the staff of my local library at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who always made me warmly welcome. I drew heavily on the support of the staff and the primary sources of the Hatcher Graduate Library who provided most of the newspapers of the time and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a specialist historical library which holds the Gordy Family papers, the personal papers of Motown publicist Al Abrams, and the private papers of Detroit radical John Sinclair. It also holds an inestimable collection of Detroit police files and photographs covering the riots of 1967.