First in the award-winning soul music trilogy—featuring Motown artists Diana Ross & the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and others. Detroit 67 is “a dramatic account of twelve remarkable months in the Motor City” during the year that changed everything (Sunday Mail). It takes you on a turbulent journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political, and interracial disputes. It is the story of Motown, the breakup of the Supremes, and the damaging clashes at the heart of the most successful African American music label ever. Set against a backdrop of urban riots, escalating war in Vietnam, and police corruption, the book weaves its way through a year when soul music came of age and the underground counterculture flourished. LSD arrived in the city with hallucinogenic power, and local guitar band MC5—self-styled holy barbarians of rock—went to war with mainstream America. A summer of street-level rebellion turned Detroit into one of the most notorious cities on earth, known for its unique creativity, its unpredictability, and self-lacerating crime rates. The year 1967 ended in social meltdown, rancor, and intense legal warfare as the complex threads that held Detroit together finally unraveled. “A whole-hearted evocation of people and places,” Detroit 67 is “a tale set at a fulcrum of American social and cultural history” (Independent).

A compelling urban portrait and touching love story, "Say Nice Things about Detroit" takes place in a racially polarized, economically collapsing city where a man struggles with the double shooting death of a high school classmate and her brother.

In the early 70s, Detroit was the musical hub of America, but by the early eighties, it was a wasteland. It took a group of skateboarders, a teacher and a census clerk to wake the city up and start one of the first hardcore punk scenes in America. Why Be Something That You're Not chronicles the first wave of Detroit hardcore from its origins in the late 70s to its demise in the mid-80s. Through oral histories and extensive imagery, the book proves that even though the California beach towns might have created the look and style of hardcore punk, it was the Detroit scene - along with a handful of other cities - that cultivated the music's grassroots aesthetic before most cultural hot spots around the globe even knew what the music was about. The book includes interviews with members of The Fix, Violent Apathy, Negative Approach, Necros, Pagans, Bored Youth, and L-Seven along with other people who had a hand in the early hardcore scene like Ian MacKaye, Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson.

WINNER OF THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE 2018 In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at ease with the modern world and yet to adjust to the era of civil rights and racial integration. Stax Records offered an escape from the turmoil of the real world for many soul and blues musicians, with much of the music created there becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movements. The book opens with the death of the city's most famous recording artist, Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in the final days of 1967, and then follows the fortunes of Redding's label, Stax/Volt Records, as its fortunes fall and rise again. But, as the tense year unfolds, the city dominates world headlines for the worst of reasons: the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

Three provocative dramas, Paradise Blue, Detroit ’67 and Skeleton Crew, make up Dominique Morisseau’s The Detroit Project, a play cycle examining the sociopolitical history of Detroit. Each play sits at a cross-section—of race and policing, of labor and recession, of property ownership and gentrification—and comes alive in the characters and relationships that look toward complex, hopeful futures. With empathetic storytelling and an ear for the voices of her home community, Morisseau brings to life the soul of Detroit, past and present.

Three more fascinating books in a multi-volume oral history of rock and soul music, edited by one of America's preeminent pop music journalists. Told in the voices of the people who were actually there, here are the stories of: (1) Sly and the Family Stone, the Woodstock-era interracial, intergender band which merged soul with psychedelic rock; (2) George Clinton and P-Funk, the inventive musical aggregation that laid the groundwork for rap, hip-hop, alternative, and techno music; and (3) Women of Motown, members of "girl groups" and solo artists during the heyday of the world's most famous record label.