This is the first-ever historical study across all musical genres in any American metropolis. Detroit in the 1940s-60s was not just "the capital of the twentieth century" for industry and the war effort, but also for the quantity and extremely high quality of its musicians, from jazz to classical to ethnic. The author, a Detroiter from 1943, begins with a reflection of his early life with his family and others, then weaves through the music traffic of all the sectors of a dynamic and volatile city. Looking first at the crucial role of the public schools in fostering talent, Motor City Music surveys the neighborhoods of older European immigrants and of the later huge waves of black and white southerners who migrated to Detroit to serve the auto and defense industries. Jazz stars, polka band leaders, Jewish violinists, and figures like Lily Tomlin emerge in the spotlight. Shaping institutions, from the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers through radio stations and
Motown, all deployed music to bring together a city rent by relentless segregation, policing, and spasms of violence. The voices of Detroit's poets, writers, and artists round out the chorus.
Industry Reviews
"As a Detroiter, Slobin is uniquely suited to this task. Most of the book's photographs are the author's own, and his intimate knowledge of Detroit is prodigious. As a result, he easily moves between discussions of music education and training to emerging musical cultures and intersections of race and style. Slobin's approachable voice and use of interviews make Motor City Music a valuable contribution to the existing scholarship on one of the hubs of
American music. Summing up: Highly recommended" -- CHOICE
"...invaluable to jazz and popular music scholars, ethnomusicologists, and cultural anthropologists alike, for whom it may provide important contextual information about the city's remarkable pool of talent." -- Alexander Gagatsis, Jazz and Culture
"Slobin shows how traditions DL ever changing and adapting DL and evolving technology created a vibrant musical culture in Motown.Slobin takes us back to a time when Detroit burst forth with a musical culture that reflected a remarkable mix of performance and innovation. In his last chapter, 'City in the Rearview Mirror,' he bids farewell to a city that set an incredibly rich musical table for him DL and for us." -- Blog of the Urban History Association
"This work inhabits the fields of sociology and anthropology at least as comfortably as musiciology... it is an intensely cross-disciplinary contribution. To the fields of cultural anthropology and sociology, it contributes a study of human migration and identity within an urban context.... It provides the casual reader with a thoughtful tour of the author's native city, while offering important simultaneous contributions to the scholarly fields of music
history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and Jewish history." -- Michigan Jewish History Review
"...Slobin takes us back to a time...when Detroit burst forth with a musical culture that reflected a remarkable mix of performance and innovation." -- Bob Carey, The Metropole
"While it is clear that Slobin builds his narrative on an extremely well-founded methodological base, the prose is nonetheless consistently light on theory, making this one of those rare books that have the potential to appeal to academic and non-academic readers alike. Motor City Music not only describes musical diversity in an urban context as enriching. It also invites diverse ways of reading it ... it is an important book, with the potential to
shape our discipline." -- Florian Scheding, Revue de musicologie
"Motor City Music is a loving portrait of one person's experience with the history of musicmaking in the D. Mark Slobin does not limit himself to one or two styles or genres, thus giving the reader valuable insight into the variety of sounds coming into and out of Detroit." -- Leonard Slatkin, Music Director Laureate, Detroit Symphony Orchestra
"What at first reads like a loose memoir of growing up Jewish in Detroit ends up being a very detailed and widely comprehensive portrait of what makes Motor City's music so special and multifarious. There is no easily-drawn metaphor to stand for this sprawling, often-terrifying, still-volatile metropolis, no clichA (c) to invoke Detroit in a few words as one might find for Chicago or New York. Mark Slobin's youthful life was exposed to an enormous
number of ethnic musics derived from the many peoples throughout the world and America who jostle each other in Detroit; this has collided into an eclectic matrix which has influenced and alimented our whole nation's
music." -- William Bolcom, composer
