Review: Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul

Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul by Stuart Cosgrove
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Detroit 67:The Year That Changed Soul is an excellent month-by-month chronology of the momentous political and social events which took place in the city in that year. Stuart Cosgrove hangs his history on Motown, the fantastically successful Hitsville USA, which was in 1967 rocked by internal events which mirrored those in the city of Detroit and the wider USA. He concentrates largely on the breakdown within The Supremes and the ousting of Florence Ballard but also covers the sacking of David Ruffin from The Temptations, Holland-Dozier-Holland's divorce from the label and the achingly sad story of Tammi Terrell.

Cosgrove is a very talented writer, particularly when covering the soul music he clearly loves, both the Motown artists and those in the wider Detroit soul scene. He is less convincing when writing about the emerging garage-rock scene and the MC5 - and Jimi Hendrix did not burn the American flag at Woodstock; he didn't need to, his incendiary rendition of the Star Spangled Banner was protest enough against the ongoing Vietnam war. But the book is largely successful and reads at times like a thriller. The sections detailing the murders of 3 black youths and the torture of others by Detroit police officers in the Algiers motel are harrowing.

1967 was the year that Motown began the move away from Detroit to LA and became less the purveyor of 'the Motown sound' but it led to the more overtly political and social commentary of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and the Norman Whitfield era Temptations. I am really looking forward to Cosgrove's take on the southern soul scene in his follow up, Memphis '68.

View all my reviews