Title
Dancing in the Street : Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit / Suzanne E. Smith.
ISBN
9780674043831
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2001]
Copyright
©2001
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (336 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.4159/9780674043831 doi
Call Number
ML3792
Dewey Decimal Classification
781.644/09774/34
Summary
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.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
Frontmatter
Contents
Illustrations
Introduction: ''Can't Forget the Motor City''
1 ''In Whose Heart There Is No Song, To Him the Miles Are Many and Long'': Motown and Detroit's Great March to Freedom
2 ''Money (That's What I Want)'': Black Capitalism and Black Freedom in Detroit
3 ''Come See about Me'': Black Cultural Production in Detroit
4 ''Afro-American Music, without Apology'': The Motown Sound and the Politics of Black Culture
5 ''The Happening'': Detroit, 1967
6 ''What's Going On?'' Motown and New Detroit
Conclusion: ''Come Get These Memories''
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
