Following the devastating 1967 rebellion in Detroit, Frank Waterman searches his soul for what he can do to give his family and community hope. Negroes have become blacks, whites have taken flight to the suburbs and the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit wants to close nearly all of its inner-city schools, including Visitation, where the Waterman family attends school and church. But the Watermans have a different idea save the schools save the children! Frank has quit the security and comfort of his position as an insurance salesman in order to direct a yet-to-be-established City Club community center near Dexter Blvd. on Detroits west side. Things heat up for the Waterman family as heroin use explodes in Detroit like an atomic bomb and the police seem to run amuck under a new tactical unit called STRESS. Meanwhile Mike, the eldest of the three Waterman children, and his St. Martin DePorres (newly merged) basketball team prepare to compete for the city title against neighborhood rival Central High School. Some of the elders in the neighborhood warn the children Be careful where you step, its a mine-field out there. But Frank tells his family and community to Keep pushing... we can reach our higher goal, because Detroits got soul.

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).

Detroit was a Jazz city in the 1950s, but with the dawn of the the Sixties, the sound the city wanted was Soul Music. You can't ignore the influence that Berry Gordy Jr had on the city's music. He built the largest Black American owned company in the world with his Motown Empire. But there was so much more to the music of the Motor City. There were hundreds of little labels who produced music just as good as that of the major labels, but for one reason or another (Usually a lack of promotion and money) they failed to become hits. This book tries to redress that balance, by focusing on the smaller labels and the artists who made great records, but never got the hits. Stuffed full to the brim with Label Listings and Artist Discographies, this is a book for the serious Detroit afficianado.

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.

A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.