A Remarkable Talent Has Left The Stage

Mary Wilson had one incontrovertible claim to fame – she was a member of The Supremes, the most successful girl group ever.

- Stuart Cosgrove

Her death leaves her teenage friend Diana Ross as the last surviving member of a trio whose story has been adapted into the Hollywood movie Dreamgirls and forms the spine of my own book Detroit 67.

My last meeting with Mary was in a hotel near the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where we talked for hours about her fascinating life.

Although she was synonymous with Motown, Wilson was not from Detroit.

She had been born in Greeneville, Mississippi, in 1944, and like many thousands of others moved to Detroit as part of the great migration north, which brought cheap labour from the segregated southern states to work in the car-plants, the iron foundries and the armament factories that had been requisitioned to support the war effort.

Mary had an unusual infancy. Her parents were unable to look after her and so she was adopted by her aunt, an agreement that unravelled when the family arrived in Detroit and her birth mother fought in the courts to have her returned.