The standees of the title are a group of men known as the FunkBrothers, superlatively gifted instrumentalists who, in the 1960s and early 1970s, created what came to be called the Motown Sound.
Background is brought to foreground in a wealth of reminiscences, interviews with surviving members, film clips from the distant past and superb concert footage from the recent past, when the reunited FunkBrothers played at Detroit's Royal Oak Music Theater behind such singers as Joan Osborne, Ben Harper, Bootsy Collins, Chaka Khan and Meshell Ndegeocello.