Product Description

Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA.

As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign.

Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #939205 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-02
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Library Journal
Smith (history, George Mason Univ.) uses Motown to examine the shift in African American protest ideologies from integration to separatism. Motown, she argues, sprang from the strong tradition of black cultural and economic self-determination that was at the foundation of Detroit's most important black institutions, such as poet Margaret Danner's Boone House and WCHB, the first African American-owned radio station. Smith chastises Motown for its hesitating to change with the times, as Detroit-based Black Muslims became more vocal in their demand for African American rights and the 1967 riot broke out. She also suggests that the label's relocation from Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972 is final evidence of the bankruptcy of its version of African American capitalism. Writing in a somewhat choppy style and using mostly secondary sources, Smith successfully contextualizes Motown within Detroit culture, but she na?vely condemns the logical consequences of the entrepreneurial spirit that drove its founder, Berry Gordy Jr., from his Detroit home to an international audience. Recommended for libraries serving social historians.
-David P. Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Suzanne E. Smith is Associate Professor of History, George Mason University.