Cobb's Corner

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

Robert Cobb and Greg Murphy opened Cobb's Corner at the corner of Cass Avenue and West Willis Street in February 1970, pairing a jazz bar with the adjoining Willis Gallery. Organist and composer Lyman Woodard led his trio here through much of the 1970s, often alongside guitarist Dennis Coffey, and in 1979 he brought his band back to record the funk classic Don't Stop the Groove for the Corridor label. Cobb sold the bar in 1978, and after a 1979 murder connected to its later owner, the club faded out in the early 1980s; the space then spent about twenty years as the Cass Corridor Food Co-op before sitting empty. In 2018, Robert Cobb himself, then seventy-seven years old, reopened Cobb's Corner in the same space under its original name, bringing the bar back to life in Detroit's revived Cass Corridor.

1. Opened in February 1970 by Robert Cobb and Greg Murphy
2. Lyman Woodard's trio played here through the 1970s
3. Woodard recorded Don't Stop the Groove here in 1979
4. Closed in the early 1980s, later the Cass Corridor Food Co-op
5. Robert Cobb reopened it under the same name in 2018