46 January 24 • 2019
jn

JACKIE HEADAPOHL MANAGING EDITOR
D

etroit is known as 
Motown, but there’
s more 
to the city’
s musical histo-
ry than the funky sounds coming 
out of Hitsville U.S.A. from the 
Supremes and Jackson Five. 
From the 1940s-1960s, there 
was a huge variety of ethnic 
music-making across Detroit’
s 139 
square miles, writes ethnomusicol-
ogist Mark Slobin in his new book, 
Motor City Music: A Detroiter 
Looks Back (Oxford University 
Press, 2018), the first-ever histori-
cal study across all musical genres 
of any American city.
The book is “part memoir, part 
social history, written for a general 
audience,” said Slobin, whose pre-
vious books about East European 
Jewish music and klezmer 
music, as well as the music of 
Afghanistan, were written for a 
more academic reader. Slobin is 
professor emeritus of music and 
American studies at Wesleyan 
University in Middletown, Conn. 
“Detroit in the 1940s-’
60s was 
not just ‘
the capital of the 20th 
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,” writes Slobin, who grew 
up in Post-WWII Detroit in the 
heart of the Jewish community.
Slobin begins the book with 
a reflection of his early life. 
Looking first at the crucial role 
of the public schools in fostering 
talent, Motor City Music sur-
veys 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. 
“Detroit was a city divided by 
race and class, union and corpo-

rate, and the main theme of the 
book is how music worked to 
unify the disparate situations of a 
troubled city,” he says. “The music 
flowed from Jew to gentile, from 
black to white … it was the cultur-
al agent of the city.”

GROWING UP IN JEWISH DETROIT
Slobin’
s father was a native 
Detroiter and his mother was an 
immigrant from southern Ukraine. 
Slobin grew up around a lot of 
Yiddish and a sense of the “old 
country.
” After a year studying 
German when he was 10, the 
“Yiddish fell into place for me,
” he 
said, “and I could write letters to 
my grandma in Yiddish.
”
His family valued music high-
ly. “They sang a lot. Around the 
piano. In the car. And it was a 
ritual to buy season tickets to the 
symphony. Music was important 
in our lives,” he said.
Although Slobin had a bar 
mitzvah, his family wasn’
t very 
observant and did not belong to a 
synagogue. 
“We had big family seders, but 
classical music was like our reli-
gion. Classical music was essential 
to the Detroit Jewish experience 
during that time.
”
Slobin began violin lessons 
when he was 4, taught by family 
friend Ben Silverstein, whose 
son would go on to become the 
concertmaster of the Boston 
Symphony. Slobin was in the all-
city orchestra by the time he was 
6 or 7. 
After Silverstein’
s untimely 
death five years later, Slobin 
continued his studies with other 
teachers, “three of whom, all in the 
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, later 
moonlighted for Motown,” he says.
In a blog for Oxford University 

books
arts&life

New book looks back at Detroit’
s 
musical legacy from the 1940s-1960s.

More Than 
Just Motown

High Praise

The book, published in November 2018, already 
has some major fans. Leonard Slatkin, music director 
laureate, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, says, “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.”

