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.”