Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back
Mark Slobin
Abstract
The book combines memoir, interview, and archival sources to survey the musical life of the author’s hometown, Detroit, in his youth during the city’s heyday, 1940s–1960s. After an opening chapter on the formation of personal musical identity, the focus shifts to the formative role of the public school system in educating and shaping the careers of waves of highly talented youth, many of whom became leading figures in African American and classical music nationally. Next comes a panorama of the “neighborhood” subcultural musics of European, southern white, and southern black immigrants to Detr ... More
The book combines memoir, interview, and archival sources to survey the musical life of the author’s hometown, Detroit, in his youth during the city’s heyday, 1940s–1960s. After an opening chapter on the formation of personal musical identity, the focus shifts to the formative role of the public school system in educating and shaping the careers of waves of highly talented youth, many of whom became leading figures in African American and classical music nationally. Next comes a panorama of the “neighborhood” subcultural musics of European, southern white, and southern black immigrants to Detroit, followed up by a close-up of the Jewish community’s special case. “Merging Traffic” considers the way that industry, labor, the counterculture, Motown, and the media brought many streams of music together. A final retrospective chapter cites the work of Detroit writers and artists who, like the author, have been looking back at the city’s impact on their work. This is the first-ever comprehensive survey of the musical life of any American city in a given time period.
Keywords:
Detroit mid-century history,
American music 1940s-1960s,
urban music history,
subcultural music history,
public school music history,
Jewish Detroit,
urban ethnomusicology,
music and urban migration
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190882082 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190882082.001.0001 |
