Introduction: "Can't Forget the Motor City" "In Whose Heart There Is No Song, To Him the Miles Are Many and Long": Motown and Detroit's Great March to Freedom "Money (That's What I Want)": Black Capitalism and Black Freedom in Detroit "Come See About Me": Black Cultural Production in Detroit "Afro-American Music, without Apology": The Motown Sound and the Politics of Black Culture "The Happening": Detroit, 1967 "What's Going On?" Motown and New Detroit Conclusion: "Come Get These Memories" Notes Acknowledgments Index
Suzanne E. Smith is Professor of History at George Mason University.
The publication of Dancing in the Streets, is an interesting one
for an academic press; there's no shortage of general-audience
books on the famed soul label, and other books have plumbed the
immediate political ramifications of Berry Gordy's
family-loan-turned-empire. But Smith aims not to glorify Motown as
a can-do parable of black business, but to define it wholly--as a
flawed microcosm of Detroit as much as one of black America. At
once symptom and synecdoche, Motown is in her eyes the inevitable
sum of its influences that somehow reenacted Detroit's external
struggles on its own Grand Street stage.
*Boston Book Review*
In her scholarly, informative, Dancing in the Street, Suzanne E.
Smith reconsiders Motown, not just as the background music of the
city's struggles but as a component of black Detroit's march for
civil rights and social justice.
*Boston Globe*
Dancing in the Street is a wonderful blend of thorough research,
firsthand interviews and an impassioned discussion of the music
which keeps the book far away from the suffocating reaches of the
academy. Smith, a Detroit native, has found in Motown's apparent
order (its arrangements, performers and beats) the perfect
juxtaposition to Detroit's growing disorder (in the riots, police
violence and cultural devastation of urban renewal).
*Detroit Metro Times*
Though we would all count Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas
and Marvin Gaye among Motown's greatest recording artists, Suzanne
E. Smith would add another: Martin Luther King Jr...[Smith] is
correct when she says it has become all but impossible to separate
what happened in Detroit in the 1960s from the music that was
playing when it did: as Norman Whitfield, the producer who replaced
Holland-Dozier-Holland as the label's primary hitmaker, put it in a
song he wrote for the Temptations, it was a 'Ball of Confusion.'
Thirty years later, we're still unraveling it, and Dancing in the
Street affords valuable insights to those of us who were there and
those of us who weren't...It is fascinating reading for anyone who
believes the sound of young America was not incompatible with the
sound of struggle.
*Detroit Free Press*
[Dancing in the Street discovers] a new approach to what had seemed
an exhausted subject. [Suzanne Smith's] self-imposed task is to
draw back from the larger picture of Motown's conquest of the
international market, setting the company in its immediate context
in Detroit, the community from which it emerged and after which it
was named, and examining its relationship with the civil-rights
struggle...[This book] adds a new dimension to our understanding of
the forces that created music which has already outlasted the long
hot summers for which it was designed.
*Times Literary Supplement*
In telling the story of the [Motown] label in its habitat, and
telling it as an everyday tale of race in America, Suzanne Smith
performs an act of historical rescue.
*The Independent*
Now, thanks to the publication of the fascinating Dancing in the
Street music fans as well as lovers of social history can grasp for
the first time the unique nature of Detroit's daily social scheme
and its impact on the lives of those who embodied the Motown Sound
during the parallel cresting of the civil rights movement...Smith
takes readers into the heretofore unexamined sphere of Detroit's
sidewalk-level social ferment from Motown's founding in 1958 on
through the city's devastating riots in 1967 and the related
early-'70s flight from its precincts of the two enterprises central
to its modern identity...If you've never heard about the Concept
East Theater; or of WCHB, the first radio station built, owned, and
operated by African-Americans; or never knew about organizations
like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; or the Freedom Now
Part (the first all-black political party in the nation), Smith's
text will explain their rich legacies.
*Billboard*
Smith performs a valuable service in showing that Gordy, rather
than being the rugged individualist often depicted, was the product
of a hard-working and supportive family, one that had displayed a
relentless self-help ethic for generations...To be sure, Smith is
mainly concerned with the larger issues, but she does a good job of
giving behind-the-scenes glimpses of the Supremes, Marvin Gaye,
Stevie Wonder and other Motown myths. While capitalism worked very
well for Motown and its principles, Smith concludes, it was a far
less effective system in exposing and eradicating the roots of
racism.
*Foreword Magazine*
Suzanne E. Smith investigates the connections between music and a
positive force: civil rights. Smith's compelling work depicts the
exponential growth of the Motown recording company and reveals its
role in shaping the civil rights movement in the urban North.
*Publisher's Weekly*
A finely rendered history of the storybook success of the 'Motown
Sound,' arguably the most resonant cultural development of its
time, within the localized context of urban turmoil and the
civil-rights struggle...Relying on primary sources and on the
recollections of Motown's acts, employees, and session players,
Smith touchingly captures the industrious determination of a
cultural community whose ambitions were underwritten by social
cohesion and a generations-strong work ethic...She captures the
spirit of this exciting time by focusing on individuals (Nat King
Cole, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Motown discoveries
like the Supremes and Marvin Gaye) whose actions were central to
their era's cultural and civil-rights triumphs. More sobering is
her re-creation of events leading to Detroit's 1967 riots, when
intransigents on both sides of the color line overrode more
moderate, conciliatory factions, leading the city toward a
conflagration that permanently sundered the region's black and
white communities. This reconstruction of Motown's meteoric popular
rise during an era of fractious social division is compelling and
informative for both aficionados of the music and students of
American urban history.
*Kirkus Reviews*
That Detroit birthed a black music style, Motown, that conquered
the white market at a time of unprecedented racial and social
upheaval has attracted much comment. Investigation, Smith observes,
has concentrated on how a black company, Motown Records, succeeded
with white audiences and on the civil rights movement's effect on
that success by fostering 'broader cultural integration.' Smite
probes deeper...Tough stuff for a pop music book, but Smith answers
rationally and evocatively in a serious book about the music biz
that is excellent for pop music collections and downright
obligatory for serious pop culture collections.
*Booklist*
Smith argues that [Motown's] immensely successful black-owned,
Detroit-based corporation had an ambivalent attitude towards the
changes brought about by Civil Rights campaigners in the 1960s: its
music was designed for a multiracial audience, yet engaged with
African-American politics.
*Financial Times*
Smith places Motown in its immediate context in the Detroit black
community from which it emerged. She presents a focussed account of
the city in the grip of social and political change. It is the
approach which will endear the book to readers of both music
journalism and historical narrative...Smith has used the rich
tapestry of the Motown sound to present a truly exceptional book.
It is well-argued and thought-provoking.
*Awaaz*
Dancing in the Street, by Suzanne E. Smith, explores 1960s Motown
music and culture against the backdrop of Detroit itself. She
contrasts the racism that greeted migrating black auto workers with
the shrewd way Motown created upbeat music that seemed to erase
color lines. As Smith sees it, music and culture had to meet.
*New York Daily News*
While music in white society was seen as a diversion from the real
world, Smith argues that in the black community it constituted
daily life. Weighty, thorough stuff.
*Q Magazine*
By pulling back "the veil of nostalgia that enshrouds" the Motown
sound, Professor Smith provides a clearer and more realistic view
of the accomplishments and limitations of Motown, the sound and the
company. The study concludes that Motown's historical legacy
encompasses outstanding contributions to the history of popular
music, to the history of Black capitalism and to the history of the
civil rights movement and race relations...This thoughtful and
well-documented study will help readers to understand how "cultural
politics" operates at grass-roots level. It will also provide them
with an informative account of the Motown sound of the 1960s.
*Race Relations Archive*
Smith details the connection between the rise and success of Motown
Records and the more specific histories of Detroit's civil rights
struggles
Dancing in the Street does and excellent job of detailing
the fine line between the production of goods and the ideology
behind that production. Suzanne Smith gives the reader an
interesting history of Detroit in the1960s and of Motown and its
cultural and musical impact, but she also provides a road map for
other studies that seek to use culture as a means to understand
larger historical situations.
*Historical Review*
Suzanne Smith's wonderful new book, Dancing in the Streets: Motown
and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, seeks to resituate the Motown
sound within the history of the Motor City and, more broadly, to
reconnect it to the larger historical moment of African American
activism that was the 1960s. As Smith reminds us, a Motown hit like
'Dancing in the Street' was 'never just a party song'. From the
outset Smith's engaging narrative immerses readers in the
fascinating tale of how Motown rose from its humble beginnings in
Detroit to become a corporate conglomerate far from its Motor City
roots
she must be given tremendous credit for identifying just how
powerful and malleable this record company was as a symbol of the
tumultuous 1960s.
*Labor History*
The publication of Dancing in the Streets, is an interesting
one for an academic press; there's no shortage of general-audience
books on the famed soul label, and other books have plumbed the
immediate political ramifications of Berry Gordy's
family-loan-turned-empire. But Smith aims not to glorify Motown as
a can-do parable of black business, but to define it wholly--as a
flawed microcosm of Detroit as much as one of black America. At
once symptom and synecdoche, Motown is in her eyes the inevitable
sum of its influences that somehow reenacted Detroit's external
struggles on its own Grand Street stage. -- Peter Rubin * Boston
Book Review *
In her scholarly, informative, Dancing in the Street,
Suzanne E. Smith reconsiders Motown, not just as the background
music of the city's struggles but as a component of black Detroit's
march for civil rights and social justice. -- Renee Graham * Boston
Globe *
Dancing in the Street is a wonderful blend of thorough
research, firsthand interviews and an impassioned discussion of the
music which keeps the book far away from the suffocating reaches of
the academy. Smith, a Detroit native, has found in Motown's
apparent order (its arrangements, performers and beats) the perfect
juxtaposition to Detroit's growing disorder (in the riots, police
violence and cultural devastation of urban renewal). * Detroit
Metro Times *
Though we would all count Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas
and Marvin Gaye among Motown's greatest recording artists, Suzanne
E. Smith would add another: Martin Luther King Jr...[Smith] is
correct when she says it has become all but impossible to separate
what happened in Detroit in the 1960s from the music that was
playing when it did: as Norman Whitfield, the producer who replaced
Holland-Dozier-Holland as the label's primary hitmaker, put it in a
song he wrote for the Temptations, it was a 'Ball of Confusion.'
Thirty years later, we're still unraveling it, and Dancing in
the Street affords valuable insights to those of us who were
there and those of us who weren't...It is fascinating reading for
anyone who believes the sound of young America was not incompatible
with the sound of struggle. -- Terry Lawson * Detroit Free Press
*
[Dancing in the Street discovers] a new approach to what had
seemed an exhausted subject. [Suzanne Smith's] self-imposed task is
to draw back from the larger picture of Motown's conquest of the
international market, setting the company in its immediate context
in Detroit, the community from which it emerged and after which it
was named, and examining its relationship with the civil-rights
struggle...[This book] adds a new dimension to our understanding of
the forces that created music which has already outlasted the long
hot summers for which it was designed. -- Richard Williams * Times
Literary Supplement *
In telling the story of the [Motown] label in its habitat, and
telling it as an everyday tale of race in America, Suzanne Smith
performs an act of historical rescue. -- Andrew Blake * The
Independent *
Now, thanks to the publication of the fascinating Dancing in the
Street music fans as well as lovers of social history can grasp
for the first time the unique nature of Detroit's daily social
scheme and its impact on the lives of those who embodied the Motown
Sound during the parallel cresting of the civil rights
movement...Smith takes readers into the heretofore unexamined
sphere of Detroit's sidewalk-level social ferment from Motown's
founding in 1958 on through the city's devastating riots in 1967
and the related early-'70s flight from its precincts of the two
enterprises central to its modern identity...If you've never heard
about the Concept East Theater; or of WCHB, the first radio station
built, owned, and operated by African-Americans; or never knew
about organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers;
or the Freedom Now Part (the first all-black political party in the
nation), Smith's text will explain their rich legacies. -- Timothy
White * Billboard *
Smith performs a valuable service in showing that Gordy, rather
than being the rugged individualist often depicted, was the product
of a hard-working and supportive family, one that had displayed a
relentless self-help ethic for generations...To be sure, Smith is
mainly concerned with the larger issues, but she does a good job of
giving behind-the-scenes glimpses of the Supremes, Marvin Gaye,
Stevie Wonder and other Motown myths. While capitalism worked very
well for Motown and its principles, Smith concludes, it was a far
less effective system in exposing and eradicating the roots of
racism. -- Edward Morris * Foreword Magazine *
Suzanne E. Smith investigates the connections between music and a
positive force: civil rights. Smith's compelling work depicts the
exponential growth of the Motown recording company and reveals its
role in shaping the civil rights movement in the urban North. *
Publisher's Weekly *
A finely rendered history of the storybook success of the 'Motown
Sound,' arguably the most resonant cultural development of its
time, within the localized context of urban turmoil and the
civil-rights struggle...Relying on primary sources and on the
recollections of Motown's acts, employees, and session players,
Smith touchingly captures the industrious determination of a
cultural community whose ambitions were underwritten by social
cohesion and a generations-strong work ethic...She captures the
spirit of this exciting time by focusing on individuals (Nat King
Cole, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Motown discoveries
like the Supremes and Marvin Gaye) whose actions were central to
their era's cultural and civil-rights triumphs. More sobering is
her re-creation of events leading to Detroit's 1967 riots, when
intransigents on both sides of the color line overrode more
moderate, conciliatory factions, leading the city toward a
conflagration that permanently sundered the region's black and
white communities. This reconstruction of Motown's meteoric popular
rise during an era of fractious social division is compelling and
informative for both aficionados of the music and students of
American urban history. * Kirkus Reviews *
That Detroit birthed a black music style, Motown, that conquered
the white market at a time of unprecedented racial and social
upheaval has attracted much comment. Investigation, Smith observes,
has concentrated on how a black company, Motown Records, succeeded
with white audiences and on the civil rights movement's effect on
that success by fostering 'broader cultural integration.' Smite
probes deeper...Tough stuff for a pop music book, but Smith answers
rationally and evocatively in a serious book about the music biz
that is excellent for pop music collections and downright
obligatory for serious pop culture collections. * Booklist *
Smith argues that [Motown's] immensely successful black-owned,
Detroit-based corporation had an ambivalent attitude towards the
changes brought about by Civil Rights campaigners in the 1960s: its
music was designed for a multiracial audience, yet engaged with
African-American politics. * Financial Times *
Smith places Motown in its immediate context in the Detroit black
community from which it emerged. She presents a focussed account of
the city in the grip of social and political change. It is the
approach which will endear the book to readers of both music
journalism and historical narrative...Smith has used the rich
tapestry of the Motown sound to present a truly exceptional book.
It is well-argued and thought-provoking. -- J. Ahmed * Awaaz *
Dancing in the Street, by Suzanne E. Smith, explores 1960s
Motown music and culture against the backdrop of Detroit itself.
She contrasts the racism that greeted migrating black auto workers
with the shrewd way Motown created upbeat music that seemed to
erase color lines. As Smith sees it, music and culture had to meet.
-- David Hinckley * New York Daily News *
While music in white society was seen as a diversion from the real
world, Smith argues that in the black community it constituted
daily life. Weighty, thorough stuff. -- Lois Wilson * Q Magazine
*
By pulling back "the veil of nostalgia that enshrouds" the Motown
sound, Professor Smith provides a clearer and more realistic view
of the accomplishments and limitations of Motown, the sound and the
company. The study concludes that Motown's historical legacy
encompasses outstanding contributions to the history of popular
music, to the history of Black capitalism and to the history of the
civil rights movement and race relations...This thoughtful and
well-documented study will help readers to understand how "cultural
politics" operates at grass-roots level. It will also provide them
with an informative account of the Motown sound of the 1960s. *
Race Relations Archive *
Smith details the connection between the rise and success of Motown
Records and the more specific histories of Detroit's civil rights
struggles Dancing in the Street does and excellent job of
detailing the fine line between the production of goods and the
ideology behind that production. Suzanne Smith gives the reader an
interesting history of Detroit in the1960s and of Motown and its
cultural and musical impact, but she also provides a road map for
other studies that seek to use culture as a means to understand
larger historical situations. -- Kenneth J. Bindas * Historical
Review *
Suzanne Smith's wonderful new book, Dancing in the Streets:
Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, seeks to resituate
the Motown sound within the history of the Motor City and, more
broadly, to reconnect it to the larger historical moment of African
American activism that was the 1960s. As Smith reminds us, a Motown
hit like 'Dancing in the Street' was 'never just a party song'.
From the outset Smith's engaging narrative immerses readers in the
fascinating tale of how Motown rose from its humble beginnings in
Detroit to become a corporate conglomerate far from its Motor City
roots she must be given tremendous credit for identifying just how
powerful and malleable this record company was as a symbol of the
tumultuous 1960s. -- Heather Ann Thompson * Labor History *
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