The 1970s File Feature
Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride
Funk From the Motor City: The Story of “Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride” by Dennis Coffey The Detroit Guitar BandThe Architect of Motown's Wah-Wah SoundLong …
01 The Story
Funk From the Motor City: The Story of “Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride” by Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band
The Architect of Motown's Wah-Wah Sound
Long before he recorded under his own name, Dennis Coffey was a fixture inside the Hitsville USA studios in Detroit, providing guitar work on some of the most successful recordings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Session players of his caliber often remain invisible to the general public while shaping the sound that the public consumes, and Coffey was one of the most consequential of that invisible cohort. His instinct for applying the wah-wah pedal to soul and funk arrangements helped define a particular moment in Motown's sonic evolution.
By 1971 he had stepped out of the shadows with his own recordings for Sussex Records, and the instrumental “Scorpio” became a genuine hit, reaching number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. That success established him as a solo artist in his own right and opened the door for subsequent releases under the Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band banner.
The Summer of 1972 and the Double-Sided Single
The release of “Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride” arrived in the early summer of 1972, a double-sided single that showcased the combination of tight rhythm-section work, Coffey's distinctive guitar vocabulary, and the muscular funk aesthetic that Detroit had been refining for years. The A-side and B-side pairing was a common commercial strategy of the era, giving radio programmers and listeners two distinct entry points into the same release.
The early 1970s were a particularly fertile period for instrumental funk. James Brown had established the template, and Detroit had its own traditions feeding into the form, drawing from soul, R&B, and the city's working-class energy. Coffey's band occupied a credible space within that landscape, rooted in technical precision and the kind of groove that rewarded repeated listening.
The Chart Performance
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 3, 1972, entering at number 97. It climbed modestly over the following weeks, reaching its peak position of number 93 on June 17, 1972, and spending four weeks on the chart before exiting. That chart run places it firmly in the lower reaches of the Hot 100, a commercial result that reflects the challenge facing instrumental funk recordings in 1972: the format could find passionate audiences at radio and in clubs without necessarily translating those audiences into chart dominance.
The Billboard Hot 100 of that summer was crowded with material from across the popular spectrum, from singer-songwriter confessionals to bubblegum pop to the emerging country-pop crossover. An instrumental funk single from a Detroit session guitarist occupied a specific niche within that landscape, respected by those who sought it out and largely invisible to those who did not.
The Enduring Pull of Detroit Funk
Dennis Coffey's broader legacy rests more securely on his session work and on recordings like “Scorpio” than on his later singles, but the Detroit Guitar Band recordings collectively represent a significant document of what Motor City funk sounded like at a particular creative peak. Hip-hop producers discovered this catalogue decades later, sampling Coffey's guitar textures and rhythmic frameworks in ways that extended his influence far beyond the original audience.
The YouTube presence of “Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride” reflects the appetite of a new generation for exactly this kind of material: raw, rhythmically sophisticated, rooted in place and time but speaking to something that transcends both. That appetite is not nostalgia; it is recognition. If you want to understand what made Detroit's music scene so distinctive in the early 1970s, and why it left such a durable mark on the broader history of American popular music, Coffey's work is as good an entry point as any.
“Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride” — Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Motion, Release, and the Language of Groove: The Meaning of “Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride”
When the Guitar Does the Talking
Instrumental recordings communicate meaning through an entirely different set of tools than vocal songs, and understanding what “Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride” means requires listening differently. There are no lyrics to parse, no narrator to identify with, no story being told in the conventional sense. Instead the music itself carries the emotional and cultural payload, and in this case that payload is considerable.
The wah-wah guitar that Dennis Coffey had made his signature instrument is not just a sound effect; it functions almost as a vocal surrogate, bending and crying and pushing forward with an expressiveness that any listener can feel viscerally even without a single word being sung. The groove underneath it creates the physical invitation to move. That combination is the whole communication.
Funk as Statement of Self
In the early 1970s, funk carried cultural weight that went well beyond entertainment. Emerging from the intersection of soul, R&B, and the rhythmic innovations that James Brown had driven into the mainstream, funk was a music of assertion and collective identity. Its emphasis on the beat, on rhythm as the primary element rather than melody or harmony, represented a deliberate prioritization of feel over polish.
Detroit brought its own industrial edge to this tradition. The city was defined by repetitive physical labor, by assembly lines and shift changes and the rhythmic machinery of manufacturing. It is not fanciful to hear that influence in the tight, mechanical precision of Coffey's band: the locked-in groove, the disciplined interplay between instruments, the sense that every player knows exactly where the one is and refuses to leave it.
The Double Title as Double Meaning
The pairing of two titles on a single release invites a reading of each as a distinct emotional proposition. "Getting It On" suggests immediacy, energy, the act of engagement itself. "Ride, Sally, Ride" evokes motion and momentum, the feeling of being carried forward by something larger than yourself. Together they form a kind of manifesto of release: get moving, keep moving, let the music take you somewhere.
For Black audiences in particular, this music offered something beyond entertainment. Funk as a genre carried an insistence on joy and bodily freedom that had real social resonance in an era still processing the upheavals of the civil rights movement and grappling with the economic pressures of the early 1970s recession.
Why It Still Connects
Decades after its original release, the track continues to find new listeners, partly through the sampling culture that hip-hop built and partly through the simple persistence of great rhythm. The groove does not date in the way that lyrical content can. Coffey's guitar work exists in that fortunate category of music that was culturally specific in its moment and yet somehow speaks across time to anyone willing to listen with their whole body.
“Getting It On/Ride, Sally, Ride” — Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
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