Edwin Starr

Edwin Starr sang like a man who'd just been let out of a cage, and "War", the 1970 Motown single Norman Whitfield produced for him, is all the proof anybody needs: a number-one hit with Starr hollering the title like a drill sergeant who's had it up to here.

He was born Charles Edwin Hatcher in Nashville on January 21, 1942, grew up in Cleveland and made his name in Detroit, singing first for Ric-Tic and then for Motown. On those early Ric-Tic sides he had a tough little backing band that would later go by Black Merda, with the group's Hawkins and Veasey playing on most of his early hits. "Twenty-Five Miles" was a major success, and so was "Stop the War Now" in 1971.

In the 1970s he packed up for England, and he kept on making music there for the rest of his life, right up until his death on April 2, 2003.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.