Detroit's social-musical heritage has an appeal beyond city, state and national borders, a Scottish author's upcoming book reconfirms.

Stuart Cosgrove, a Glasgow broadcast executive and radio host, is also a soul music fan. He dives into 12 eventful months in "Detroit '67," a 610-page book subtitled "The Year That Changed Soul."


This vintage shot of Bettye LaVette and Larry Demps of The Dramatics is in the book.

In a message to Deadline with his back-cover text, the author says he looks at "the story of Motown, the breakup of The Supremes and the implosion of the most successful African-American music label ever."

Cosgrove, whose book comes out March 31 in hardcover, paperback and electronic editions, revisits ultra-familiar Detroit topics from a half-century ago: racial unrest, police corruption, antiwar protests, LSD and the MC5. He tentatively plans a promotional visit to Detroit this summer, the writer tells Deadline, 

"My academic background is in American history," he says in a U.K. interview posted last week.

"I’ve always been interested in the period around the Vietnam War, with the fight for civil rights and the country’s struggle to come to terms with black power. Shot across the musical history is a deeper, wider social history, and I think this is the first soul book which looks at both together. . . . The music of Motown fits the mood of its times far more because of context rather than content."

Diana Ross and Mary Wilson both had brothers in Vietnam, he notes.

Cosgrove, 62, has Ph.Ds in media, English and American studies. He visited Southeast Michigan for research at Wayne State's Reuther Library and the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, where materials include documents from Berry Gordy, Motown publicist Al Abrams and social activist John Sinclair.


The book, available March 31, exceeds 600 pages in hardback.

The author, who earlier wrote a book on "Scottish football rogues," promotes the new title on Facebook with teasers such as these:

  • In June 1967, Muhammad Ali fought an exhibition bout against local heavyweight Alvin "Blue" Lewis. Three days later he was stripped of his titles for resisting the military draft and refusing to fight in Vietnam.
  • In August 1967, singer Larry Demps of The Dramatics "witnessed one of the worst killings and miscarriages of justice in Detroit's history when three young soul boys were shot dead by a rogue unit of the Detroit Police."
  • Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell were paid by Expo '67 in Montreal to perform as "two young Negro lovers out for the day," an effort to offset racism accusations against Canada's biggest trade exhibition.
  • "Detroit R&B producer ‘Diamond Jim’ Riley anticipated gangsta rap by more than thirty years. His one and only record, "Do the Diamond Jim," by Diamond Jim himself and released on Diamond Jim Records, reflected his gargantuan ego."
  • "The Real Housewives of Detroit were a radical group of black women who spent their household cash in shops that were fair to the black community. Berry Gordy's mother was a member. Indirectly, their spirit influenced the rise of Detroit Soul."

Though Cosgrove presents the solid facts and interpretation expected of an ex-journalist, amped-up jacket language hypes his detailed narrative as describing "a summer of street-level rebellion [that] turned Detroit into one of the most notorious cities on earth . . . as the complex threads that held Detroit together finally unraveled."