The standees of the title are a group of men known as the Funk Brothers, superlatively gifted instrumentalists who, in the 1960s and early 1970s, created what came to be called the Motown Sound.

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We've still got an unbelievable amount of talent in the music world, and so from a culture standpoint, it's no longer the Motown sound, but it's a lot of gritty stuff that's out there right now and we have to accept that because the talent is here.

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As the film observes with an excess of equanimity, fans and musicologists alike have claimed to find the secret of the Motown Sound in everything from the label's stars to its producers or the wood on the studio floor, yet they've overlooked, or underheard, the most obvious source of all, the studio musicians.

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The original was recorded in 1965 with a pure Motown sound.

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Though Motown Records was the top label of the 1960s, inventing what it called "the Sound of Young America, " by 1969 -- when Jackson and his brothers in the Jackson 5 first hit the charts -- the label was finding itself out of step with the psychedelic and hard-soul sounds of the times.

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