The high, driving soprano beneath "Dancing in the Street," "(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave" and "Nowhere to Run" belonged to Rosalind Ashford, a founding member of Martha and the Vandellas. She died on September 15, 2026, in Redford, Michigan, at 83.

Detroit's Motown sound in the early 1960s produced more than one girl group, but the Vandellas carried a rawer, church-rooted edge next to the polish of the Supremes, and Ashford's soprano was part of what gave the group its grit. She had been singing since childhood, in church choirs and at community centers in Detroit, before joining the glee club and mixed chorus at Wilbur Wright High School.

In 1957, Edward "Pops" Larkins recruited Ashford at a Detroit YMCA club to form a vocal trio with Annette Beard and Gloria Williams, first called the Del-Phis. The group later recorded as the Vels for Chess Records' Checkmate label in 1961, and its members sang backing vocals on Marvin Gaye's early Motown singles, including "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Hitch Hike."

In September 1962, Ashford signed to Motown Records alongside Martha Reeves and Annette Beard as Martha and the Vandellas. Over the next seven years the trio, later joined by other members, put Ashford's high soprano behind a run of hits: "Come and Get These Memories," "(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave," "Quicksand," "Dancing in the Street," "Nowhere to Run," "I'm Ready for Love" and "Jimmy Mack," according to That Eric Alper.

Ashford left the group in 1969. She married and was known afterward as Rosalind Ashford-Holmes, and she went to work for Michigan Bell Telephone Company, trading the road for a job that had nothing to do with the charts.

She did not stay away from the music for good. In 1989 she rejoined Reeves and Beard to record "Step Into My Shoes," and in the years after she performed periodically with reunited lineups billed as the Original Vandellas. In 1995, the group's contribution to the Motown sound was formally recognized: Martha and the Vandellas were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, presented by Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson of the B-52s, and Ashford's name is among the signatures on the group's induction plaque, per the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Ashford died at 83 in Redford, Michigan, according to EntertainmentNow, which reported that she is survived by her son, Damon Holmes, four grandchildren and a daughter-in-law, with funeral arrangements pending at James H. Cole Funeral Home on Schaefer Highway in Detroit.

"Her voice will forever be with us through our great recordings together," Martha Reeves wrote after learning of Ashford's death, adding, "our Motown family has just gotten a little smaller."

A former Motown colleague, Pat Cosby, recalled the reunions the two attended together at a Detroit-area restaurant in later years: "The memories are still precious. We had good times while we could."

What Ashford leaves in the grooves is plain enough to hear: the handclaps and urgency of "Dancing in the Street," the churning backbeat of "Nowhere to Run," the soprano line running under Reeves' lead on record after record cut on Detroit's West Grand Boulevard. Her signature sits on a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame plaque next to the other women who built that sound with her, and the songs she sang on are still played, still danced to, nearly seven decades after a YMCA club in Detroit put three teenagers together and called them a group.