Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit

Motown is inescapable these days. I was talking with a friend on the phone today and she was mentioning how Michael Jackson was on TV in Tokyo. Motown directly and indirectly has influenced black culture so much and this Dreamgirls moment is a mighty opportunity to peer beyond the veil and see some of the less talked about sides of Motown. Many focus on the content of Motown music but Motown as a case study in Black Capitalism is a more prickly topic. Suzanne Smith chooses to highlight several episodes in Motown's history against the history of Detroit that was taking place behind it. In this book you're getting exposed to some lesser known events in Motown's history along with community history of Detroit. This book will be of greatest interest to scholars in the music business and urban history. I don't feel that this is the best place for those to turn who just like the sound of Motown's music and want to learn more. Suzanne Smith's perspective is that Motown had to be a Black Business due to the nature of its times and the affect that its music had on its surrounding community. In a little bit over 250 pages of text [thorough academic references take up the rest], it's hard to make a rock solid case for that point. Conventional wisdom is that Berry Gordy was a *family* capitalist more than a black capitalist and Motown was more about making money for the Gordy family than the Detroit community. Motown struggled to scale up when the Supremes hit big at the same time that the nation lost its faith in coalition politics. Rather than go Black Power, Gordy became focused on Hollywood and abandoned the grassroots foundation of Motown. I feel that's more the interpretation in other books that I've read on the topic and this book wasn't thorough enough to overturn that perspective. On the other hand, this book certainly spices that conventional wisdom up a bit. I recently purchased and read Perniel Joseph's "Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of the Black Power Movement". This book offers an effective cultural complement to that work. Joseph talks about Rev. Albert Cleage, father of popular novelist Pearl Cleage. In Dancing in the Street you learn more about the cultural battles that Detroit leaders like Rev. Cleage and Rev. C.L. Franklin, father of Aretha Franklin, were fighting to raise the status of black people in a city that was losing industrial jobs. There are some stories in this book that add complexity to my understanding of Motown. I did not realize that Langston Hughes had recorded for Motown. I did not know that the Supremes had recorded a public service movie for a campaign to raise money for a local charity and that Florence Ballard was included in the movie despite Cindy Birdsong's replacing her to maintain ties to the hometown fans! Like Barack Obama in 2007, Motown had a delicate balance to maintain with national and international ambitions as a goal even as they had to continually convince local talent to be p

Professor Suzanne E. Smith' project *Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit* is a well-written and fascinating work of revisionist, myth-busting history. For perhaps no other musical institution has been given such a large free pass for (mis)representing its founder's ideology as the company's actual history. The story of Motown is usually told as the early story of Berry Gordy, a member of an Black entrepreneurial family who borrows $800 from his other family members and ends up the king of a musical empire, thus proving the Horatio Alger myth that anyone (even an African-American) with a little grit and determination can succeed in America. But such a story fails to account for much of the instituional, and ideological factors that made a specific type of entrepreneurial cultural production possible in Detroit, Michigan. Along with churches, temples, businesses, newspapers and activists, we are treated to a history of Motown that is deeply inscribed in an underclass familial net of relationships and social networks, given a boost by black media and a history of both jazz production and humanistic training for songwriters and musicians in the Detroit educational system. Not in the least, there was the automotive industry, which was both a source of Black humilation, frustation, and yet inspiration for adapting technologies and industrial processes of streamling and assembly-line production. Motown literally manufactured its artists using the same separate teams for songwriting, backup production, etiquette and image cultivation for all its artists. As the business grows the model remains, although soon Motown is a multi-million dollar international industry, and no longer a small paternalistically run family operation. Throughout it all, Motown is given a both a special place in the Black community and a difficult role in attempting to market its product to a larger white (and mostly teenage) audience. Indebted to the civil rights ideologies of Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson, Motown maintains an ambivalent relationship with the fracturing civil rights movement and its divergent leaders and interests. As the tumultuousness of 1967 and 1968 come forth, the fissures at Motown erupt, as many artists demand a greater profit-sharing, and more creative control over their music and roles at the company. We see and follow the careers and songs of the Supremes, Little Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas, and well as The Miracles and Marvin Gaye. Smith builds a woven patchwork of cultural history and its emergent politics around several different themes, such as the rise and ultimate failure of Black capitalism to remain tied to its original community, the uses or Motown for the greater Detroit black community, and the role of other Motown among other institutions in ameliorating economic and political hardship for the Black community, both locally and nationally. We get to set not only the production side of

Suzanne Smith deserves tremendous credit for transforming her love of Detroit, her home; her love of Motown, the soul music of her generation; and her love of historical analysis, the career she has chosen, into a remarkably readable and indeed breathtaking review of a city, a time, and a musical genre that is too often neglected. Sure, the most celebrated heirs of the Motown legend, the Jackson family, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, achieved fame and fortune. But Barry Gordy's Motown -- the Motown of European-Americans like Suzanne Smith, and the Motown of all of Detoit's people of color, needs to be remembered often and with affection. That Suzanne Smith can tell the story of Detroit in the turbulent 1960s with such style and grace, is a testament to her skill as an analyst of culture and her skill as one of the next generation of honored historians. Presently at George Mason University in Virginia, look for Professor Smith to soon teach from a tenured chair in Ann Arbor, Michigan; New Haven, Connecticut; or Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is Motor City history from the inside outward, and if you know the REAl city, from the Graystone Ballroom to the Chit Chat Club to WJLB and the City Wide Dry Cleaners, then you KNOW what I'm gettin into. A beautiful job of history that moves like the music of Hitsville, U.S.A. did. You go, girl!

An incisive combination of music journalism and pathbreaking social history about the city, people and circumstances that gave rise to, participated in, supported,and finally watched the physical exit from the Motor City in the early '70s of Motown Records. A vivid and unforgettable study of the roots of an important facet of American cultural history. Excellent.