Dancing in the Street

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.

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., 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., 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)., 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., [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.

Suzanne E. Smith is Professor of History at George Mason University.