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Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit
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.
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.
334 pages, Paperback
First published January 10, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 12, 2010
Smith (history, George Mason Univ.) uses Motown to examine the shift in African American protest ideologies from integration to separatism. Motown, she argues, sprang from the strong tradition of black cultural and economic self-determination that was at the foundation of Detroit's most important black institutions, such as poet Margaret Danner's Boone House and WCHB, the first African American-owned radio station. Smith chastises Motown for its hesitating to change with the times, as Detroit-based Black Muslims became more vocal in their demand for African American rights and the 1967 riot broke out. She also suggests that the label's relocation from Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972 is final evidence of the bankruptcy of its version of African American capitalism. Writing in a somewhat choppy style and using mostly secondary sources, Smith successfully contextualizes Motown within Detroit culture, but she na?vely condemns the logical consequences of the entrepreneurial spirit that drove its founder, Berry Gordy Jr., from his Detroit home to an international audience. Recommended for libraries serving social historians.
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.
Detroit Metro Times : 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).
Detroit Free Press : 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.
--Terry Lawson
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.
Billboard : Now, thanks to the publication of the fascinating Dancing in the Street music fans as well as lovers of social history can grasp for the first time the unique nature of Detroit's daily social scheme and its impact on the lives of those who embodied the Motown Sound during the parallel cresting of the civil rights movement...Smith takes readers into the heretofore unexamined sphere of Detroit's sidewalk-level social ferment from Motown's founding in 1958 on through the city's devastating riots in 1967 and the related early-'70s flight from its precincts of the two enterprises central to its modern identity...If you've never heard about the Concept East Theater; or of WCHB, the first radio station built, owned, and operated by African-Americans; or never knew about organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; or the Freedom Now Part (the first all-black political party in the nation), Smith's text will explain their rich legacies.
Publisher's Weekly : Suzanne E. Smith investigates the connections between music and a positive force: civil rights. Smith's compelling work depicts the exponential growth of the Motown recording company and reveals its role in shaping the civil rights movement in the urban North.
That Detroit birthed a black music style, Motown, that conquered the white market at a time of unprecedented racial and social upheaval has attracted much comment. Investigation, Smith observes, has concentrated on how a black company, Motown Records, succeeded with white audiences and on the civil rights movement's effect on that success by fostering 'broader cultural integration.' Smite probes deeper...Tough stuff for a pop music book, but Smith answers rationally and evocatively in a serious book about the music biz that is excellent for pop music collections and downright obligatory for serious pop culture collections.
New York Daily News : Dancing in the Street, by Suzanne E. Smith, explores 1960s Motown music and culture against the backdrop of Detroit itself. She contrasts the racism that greeted migrating black auto workers with the shrewd way Motown created upbeat music that seemed to erase color lines. As Smith sees it, music and culture had to meet.
--David Hinckley
Q Magazine : While music in white society was seen as a diversion from the real world, Smith argues that in the black community it constituted daily life. Weighty, thorough stuff.
--Lois Wilson
Race Relations Archive : By pulling back "the veil of nostalgia that enshrouds" the Motown sound, Professor Smith provides a clearer and more realistic view of the accomplishments and limitations of Motown, the sound and the company. The study concludes that Motown's historical legacy encompasses outstanding contributions to the history of popular music, to the history of Black capitalism and to the history of the civil rights movement and race relations...This thoughtful and well-documented study will help readers to understand how "cultural politics" operates at grass-roots level. It will also provide them with an informative account of the Motown sound of the 1960s.
Historical Review : Smith details the connection between the rise and success of Motown Records and the more specific histories of Detroit's civil rights struggles…Dancing in the Street does and excellent job of detailing the fine line between the production of goods and the ideology behind that production. Suzanne Smith gives the reader an interesting history of Detroit in the1960s and of Motown and its cultural and musical impact, but she also provides a road map for other studies that seek to use culture as a means to understand larger historical situations.
--Kenneth J. Bindas
Labor History : Suzanne Smith's wonderful new book, Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, seeks to resituate the Motown sound within the history of the Motor City and, more broadly, to reconnect it to the larger historical moment of African American activism that was the 1960s. As Smith reminds us, a Motown hit like 'Dancing in the Street' was 'never just a party song'. From the outset Smith's engaging narrative immerses readers in the fascinating tale of how Motown rose from its humble beginnings in Detroit to become a corporate conglomerate far from its Motor City roots…she must be given tremendous credit for identifying just how powerful and malleable this record company was as a symbol of the tumultuous 1960s.
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.
Detroit Metro Times : 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).
Detroit Free Press : 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.
--Terry Lawson
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.
Billboard : Now, thanks to the publication of the fascinating Dancing in the Street music fans as well as lovers of social history can grasp for the first time the unique nature of Detroit's daily social scheme and its impact on the lives of those who embodied the Motown Sound during the parallel cresting of the civil rights movement...Smith takes readers into the heretofore unexamined sphere of Detroit's sidewalk-level social ferment from Motown's founding in 1958 on through the city's devastating riots in 1967 and the related early-'70s flight from its precincts of the two enterprises central to its modern identity...If you've never heard about the Concept East Theater; or of WCHB, the first radio station built, owned, and operated by African-Americans; or never knew about organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; or the Freedom Now Part (the first all-black political party in the nation), Smith's text will explain their rich legacies.
Publisher's Weekly : Suzanne E. Smith investigates the connections between music and a positive force: civil rights. Smith's compelling work depicts the exponential growth of the Motown recording company and reveals its role in shaping the civil rights movement in the urban North.
That Detroit birthed a black music style, Motown, that conquered the white market at a time of unprecedented racial and social upheaval has attracted much comment. Investigation, Smith observes, has concentrated on how a black company, Motown Records, succeeded with white audiences and on the civil rights movement's effect on that success by fostering 'broader cultural integration.' Smite probes deeper...Tough stuff for a pop music book, but Smith answers rationally and evocatively in a serious book about the music biz that is excellent for pop music collections and downright obligatory for serious pop culture collections.
New York Daily News : Dancing in the Street, by Suzanne E. Smith, explores 1960s Motown music and culture against the backdrop of Detroit itself. She contrasts the racism that greeted migrating black auto workers with the shrewd way Motown created upbeat music that seemed to erase color lines. As Smith sees it, music and culture had to meet.
--David Hinckley
Q Magazine : While music in white society was seen as a diversion from the real world, Smith argues that in the black community it constituted daily life. Weighty, thorough stuff.
--Lois Wilson
Race Relations Archive : By pulling back "the veil of nostalgia that enshrouds" the Motown sound, Professor Smith provides a clearer and more realistic view of the accomplishments and limitations of Motown, the sound and the company. The study concludes that Motown's historical legacy encompasses outstanding contributions to the history of popular music, to the history of Black capitalism and to the history of the civil rights movement and race relations...This thoughtful and well-documented study will help readers to understand how "cultural politics" operates at grass-roots level. It will also provide them with an informative account of the Motown sound of the 1960s.
Historical Review : Smith details the connection between the rise and success of Motown Records and the more specific histories of Detroit's civil rights struggles…Dancing in the Street does and excellent job of detailing the fine line between the production of goods and the ideology behind that production. Suzanne Smith gives the reader an interesting history of Detroit in the1960s and of Motown and its cultural and musical impact, but she also provides a road map for other studies that seek to use culture as a means to understand larger historical situations.
--Kenneth J. Bindas
Labor History : Suzanne Smith's wonderful new book, Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, seeks to resituate the Motown sound within the history of the Motor City and, more broadly, to reconnect it to the larger historical moment of African American activism that was the 1960s. As Smith reminds us, a Motown hit like 'Dancing in the Street' was 'never just a party song'. From the outset Smith's engaging narrative immerses readers in the fascinating tale of how Motown rose from its humble beginnings in Detroit to become a corporate conglomerate far from its Motor City roots…she must be given tremendous credit for identifying just how powerful and malleable this record company was as a symbol of the tumultuous 1960s.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 24, 2024
This book places Berry Gordy's creation of Motown Records in the dichotomy of two ways forward in the civil rights movement in Detroit in the 1960s. The backstory of the Gordy family's roots in Detroit as independent business owners, how the Ford Company's promise of a high paying (for the time) job on the assembly lines brought Black migrants to Detroit during the Great Migration, and the changing dynamics of Black Detroit from the 1940s to the 1960s were all well done and necessary for the book's main argument about the limitations of Black Capitalism to solve society's greater and more complex issues.
The juggling act that Motown eventually found itself in between promoting a business that became as successful as it did because it made music that appealed to both a black and white audience in the 1960s and being, at least in the early and mid 60s, an example of how Black Americans can independently create successful businesses that take people into the Black middle class without major and white-owned corporations was happening at the same time that civil rights leaders were debating Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest approach and the Nation of Islam's (Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X's) more revolutionary approach for fighting for civil rights. The book really does a great job of expanding on the contradictions that Motown confronted in this regard by documenting this history of King and X's visits to Detroit to give speeches in 1963 (Motown recorded King's speech but chose not to record X's) started to change the perception of the record company both to the national, white focused audiences and to Black Detroiters in different ways.
I can't recommend this book enough to those interested not only in the music but to the cultural impact, or arguably lack of real substantive impact towards the ultimate goal of a majority of Black Detroiters (religious leaders sided more with Malcolm X in Detroit according to the book) towards the end of the 1960s and into the early 70s once the company moved to Los Angeles. There are also some really cool stories about the formation of some of my favorite Motown groups like The Miracles, The Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas.
The juggling act that Motown eventually found itself in between promoting a business that became as successful as it did because it made music that appealed to both a black and white audience in the 1960s and being, at least in the early and mid 60s, an example of how Black Americans can independently create successful businesses that take people into the Black middle class without major and white-owned corporations was happening at the same time that civil rights leaders were debating Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest approach and the Nation of Islam's (Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X's) more revolutionary approach for fighting for civil rights. The book really does a great job of expanding on the contradictions that Motown confronted in this regard by documenting this history of King and X's visits to Detroit to give speeches in 1963 (Motown recorded King's speech but chose not to record X's) started to change the perception of the record company both to the national, white focused audiences and to Black Detroiters in different ways.
I can't recommend this book enough to those interested not only in the music but to the cultural impact, or arguably lack of real substantive impact towards the ultimate goal of a majority of Black Detroiters (religious leaders sided more with Malcolm X in Detroit according to the book) towards the end of the 1960s and into the early 70s once the company moved to Los Angeles. There are also some really cool stories about the formation of some of my favorite Motown groups like The Miracles, The Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas.
February 6, 2016
An intriguing look into the creation of the Motown sound. A great slice of Detroit history.
Read
June 24, 2016781.64409 S6618 1999
March 5, 2025
Suzanne E. Smith’s Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit is a deep dive into the significance of Motown Records and its relationship with the city of Detroit and the civil rights movement gaining momentum during the pivotal years of its establishment. Smith does an impeccable job dissecting the nuances of Motown’s success and its unquestionable impact on racial tolerance, as well as directly addressing some ambivalent factors where the company ducked just under the radar regarding making outright stances on civil rights in America. It’s the story of Black success in the music industry, the importance of Detroit’s complex racial divide and its influence on music at the time, and a commentary on Black capitalism – namely, how it worked and, possibly more notably, how it didn’t.
For Smith, Detroit is an important backdrop for the birth of the Motown sound. During the wartime years, Detroit’s Ford automotive industry amplified production to meet needs as the Great Migration was still well underway, and Black people from Southern states were migrating in great numbers to industrialized cities in search of unskilled labor opportunities. Racial tensions peaked in the early to mid-1940s as white workers were resentful (and racist) over sharing workspaces with Black people. When three Black men received promotions at the Packard plant, nearly 30,000 white employees staged a walk-out protest, and violence erupted on Detroit’s Belle Island bridge, where 34 people were killed (25 Black and 9 white), and a fierce resentment of the Detroit Police Department and city officials amplified in the eyes of the Black community (Smith, 33). In the early 1960s, deindustrialization, automation, and the city’s involvement in the forced gentrification practices of formerly Black neighborhoods once again brought racial tensions to a boiling point. With the support of Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverand Albert B. Cleage, Jr. organized The Great March to Freedom in Detroit, where Motown Records helped the success of the movement by publishing the first spoken-word record – MLK’s speech at the event. Motown Records, founded in 1958 by Barry Gordy, Jr., had already reached national success with “Money (That’s What I Want)” just one year after its existence as the first Black-owned major music production company. Motown’s release of MLK’s speech was the foundation of the Black Forum, which gave a voice to the Black experience and struggle and proved to be an instrumental tool in the fight for civil rights.
While its spoken-word records helped amplify Black voices, Smith argues that Motown Records' success also exemplified Black economic independence in Detroit outside of the automotive industry. In November 1963, the Billboard Music Charts suspended the rhythm and blues category, classifying the nationally popular tunes from Detroit in the more racially inclusive “pop” category (Smith, 88). Business was booming, and Motown stars were known worldwide, often televised via popular shows like The Ed Sullivan Show, whose popularity helped to cultivate increased racial tolerance. Motown Records aimed to personify Black capitalism, thriving on a “self-help imperative” (Smith, 97, 132). However, many critics argue that Black capitalism didn’t work quite the way Barry, Jr. had intended. Motown received plenty of protest over perceived inequitable royalties to artists, less-than-ideal contracts, and shady cross-collateralization policies. Smith contends that Black capitalism, which Barry, Jr. hoped would trickle back down into the Black community and help to provide racial and economic justice, proved to be more myth than reality, particularly after Motown left Detroit for Los Angeles and the film production industry that awaited there (Smith, 223-227).
Ultimately, Barry, Jr’s efforts had an undeniable effect on race relations through his “Motown Sound,” which Barry himself boasted as being one of “rats, roaches, soul, guts, and love” (Smith, 155). Though many in Detroit’s Black community may have criticized what likely felt like an abandonment when the company moved to L.A., Barry had also denied distributors the pop hits they longed for without also taking on the Black Forum recordings. Motown embodied the American dream and made it attainable to the Black community of Detroit and beyond.
For Smith, Detroit is an important backdrop for the birth of the Motown sound. During the wartime years, Detroit’s Ford automotive industry amplified production to meet needs as the Great Migration was still well underway, and Black people from Southern states were migrating in great numbers to industrialized cities in search of unskilled labor opportunities. Racial tensions peaked in the early to mid-1940s as white workers were resentful (and racist) over sharing workspaces with Black people. When three Black men received promotions at the Packard plant, nearly 30,000 white employees staged a walk-out protest, and violence erupted on Detroit’s Belle Island bridge, where 34 people were killed (25 Black and 9 white), and a fierce resentment of the Detroit Police Department and city officials amplified in the eyes of the Black community (Smith, 33). In the early 1960s, deindustrialization, automation, and the city’s involvement in the forced gentrification practices of formerly Black neighborhoods once again brought racial tensions to a boiling point. With the support of Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverand Albert B. Cleage, Jr. organized The Great March to Freedom in Detroit, where Motown Records helped the success of the movement by publishing the first spoken-word record – MLK’s speech at the event. Motown Records, founded in 1958 by Barry Gordy, Jr., had already reached national success with “Money (That’s What I Want)” just one year after its existence as the first Black-owned major music production company. Motown’s release of MLK’s speech was the foundation of the Black Forum, which gave a voice to the Black experience and struggle and proved to be an instrumental tool in the fight for civil rights.
While its spoken-word records helped amplify Black voices, Smith argues that Motown Records' success also exemplified Black economic independence in Detroit outside of the automotive industry. In November 1963, the Billboard Music Charts suspended the rhythm and blues category, classifying the nationally popular tunes from Detroit in the more racially inclusive “pop” category (Smith, 88). Business was booming, and Motown stars were known worldwide, often televised via popular shows like The Ed Sullivan Show, whose popularity helped to cultivate increased racial tolerance. Motown Records aimed to personify Black capitalism, thriving on a “self-help imperative” (Smith, 97, 132). However, many critics argue that Black capitalism didn’t work quite the way Barry, Jr. had intended. Motown received plenty of protest over perceived inequitable royalties to artists, less-than-ideal contracts, and shady cross-collateralization policies. Smith contends that Black capitalism, which Barry, Jr. hoped would trickle back down into the Black community and help to provide racial and economic justice, proved to be more myth than reality, particularly after Motown left Detroit for Los Angeles and the film production industry that awaited there (Smith, 223-227).
Ultimately, Barry, Jr’s efforts had an undeniable effect on race relations through his “Motown Sound,” which Barry himself boasted as being one of “rats, roaches, soul, guts, and love” (Smith, 155). Though many in Detroit’s Black community may have criticized what likely felt like an abandonment when the company moved to L.A., Barry had also denied distributors the pop hits they longed for without also taking on the Black Forum recordings. Motown embodied the American dream and made it attainable to the Black community of Detroit and beyond.
May 5, 2023
This book is so rich in details about the effect Motown had on the civil rights movement between 1958 and 1973. This is not the typical mainstream about black history. It's more of a-all-inclusive, who's-who of civil rights leaders, the various industries, such as automotive, television networks, politicians, law enforcements, and entertainers just to name a few. A lot of the songs that came out of Motown were about what was going on during that era. For example, "Dancing in the Streets" by Martha and the Vandellas came out after the Watts riots of August 11, 1965. And my all-time favorite, "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye came out in 1971 about the effects of Vietnam. The list goes on and on. The author really put a lot of time and effort into the research of this book. Throughout the reading of this book, I would stop to read the notes in the back of the book and then make my own notes. A must read for economic and history enthuses.
July 18, 2025
This is a cultural, economic and social look at 1960s Detroit, and how it affected Motown, and how Motown was affected by it. It's not a music history of Motown so much, but a different look at the legendary label, and how Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Langston Hughes were involved. Definitely recommended for those into music and cultural and social issues.
December 4, 2022
This was a good and educational read. This country has always wanted to benefit off of black art while discarding the people. Learning the history is empowering and disheartening all at once.
October 21, 2020
One of the best books about African American music when it came out, and it holds up very well. Smith does a great job grounding Motown in the complicated cross currents of Detroit and the larger landscape of race in the Sixties. First-rate work, and a lasting part of the Sixties library.
Want to read
December 5, 2014For my history of American popular music class. This one was actually written by the professor teaching the class... we'll see what happens during class discussion.
January 16, 2017
Love the topic, but the disjointed writing style combined with the disorganized timeline make the novel read more like a textbook a fair amount of the time.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews