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.
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