Joe Von Battle was a self-made man, who followed a well-trod path from the rural South to the urban north during the Great Migration. His Detroit record shop not only sold the sounds of the black South—blues and gospel— but recorded many of the recent arrivals all around him. Artists like Aaron “Little Sonny” Willis, John Lee Hooker, Reverend C.L. Franklin, and his daughter Aretha. But the promise of Detroit wore thin for many black residents, and under the surface of the golden age, trouble was brewing. Joe’s Records would be caught in the middle of the tumult that overtook the city in 1967, but his daughter Marsha Music has kept his story alive.
