“When Soul music started getting funky in the late 1960s, a select group of fans in the North of England chose to resist the new sounds and began attending specialist clubs which had opted to continue playing the type of Soul they favoured: broadly speaking, anything that featured the stomping beat of Motown’s ‘Sound of Young America’ circa 1966. As interest in these night-spots grew, and a discernible sub-culture began to develop around this underground post-Mod movement, the clubs’ disc jockeys faced the problem of finding new records to spin. When the supply of releases by British record labels became exhausted, it was discovered that literally thousands of hopeful Soul singers had cut Motown-esque tracks for local independent labels throughout the USA during the mid-Sixties: most of these efforts had failed commercially, and many of the performers had quickly returned to their day jobs, but the songs that they had recorded were just waiting to be rediscovered.”

— DVD Savant Review: The Strange World of Northern Soul