Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back by Mark Slobin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back by Mark Slobin Peter La Chapelle (bio) Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back. By Mark Slobin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 248 pp. In this latest offering, Slobin, an ethnomusicologist who has authored more than ten books mostly on Jewish and Central Asian music, turns his focus to his hometown of Detroit and its musical history. But unlike the traditional urban musical history which divides a city's music into periods and genres, Motor City Music takes an unexpected and, in many ways, quite groundbreaking turn by making the story personal. This perhaps was a risky proposition, but one which the author handles with considerable skill. A reader might assume, based on the first forty pages or so, that this is more a memoir than it is a comprehensive glimpse at the music of the city. The first chapter explores Slobin's and his extended family's experiences with listening to music, music education, and musical performance, while the second explores the uneven and sometimes biased ways in which the Detroit school system churned out musicians, using Slobin's own experiences and those of friends and family and interviewees as means of assessing the city's musical education legacy. The advantage of this approach is that rather than a dry exploration of remaining news clippings about the role of the family and the school system, he fleshes out a more personal story that, though the focus is hyperlocalized, offers the readers gems about his own blended Ukrainian-Jewish-American family's musical repertoire, which ranged from early twentieth-century love songs to classical to Merle Travis' "Sixteen Tons" to the silly satirical Russian ditty "Vanka," as well as their efforts to learn instruments and acquire knowledge of the musical world. At times more context and analysis would further illuminate the meanings of individual songs and do more to explain why various musicians went in the directions they did, but he makes perhaps more important larger points about the eclectic ways that humans acquire a sense of musical taste and are acquainted with different types of music. He also sheds light on how attitudes about gender, race, and social class have shaped musical schooling and how remnants of musical cultures can stretch down through continents and generations. The next three chapters are less personal and more historical and try to answer questions about the larger musical history of the city. Slobin notes in his introduction that he wrote this book in part because histories of Detroit's musical world are "thin" and in part because the city's social order itself, with notable exceptions such as Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1997), has "hardly been studied and written about" (9). Chapter four examines the kinds of music brought to various neighborhoods by three groups: immigrant Europeans, especially [End Page 476] Polish-Americans; white Appalachian migrants; and Blacks. His short sketches of each of these geographical spaces and musical cultures offer important insights that should help those familiar with sources such as M. L. Leiber's edited collection of writings on music, Heaven was Detroit (2016), flesh out the earlier parts of the story. They also point scholars toward some important areas for future research. The next chapter, perhaps the strongest in the book, examines Jewish musical output. Throughout the book Slobin offers a rich portrait of how Jews adapted and made a musical life in a city that, though not completely unwelcoming, was home to influential antisemites such as Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin, especially in terms of balancing assimilation (the Christmas carols that Detroit's Jewish schoolchildren often sang) with acts of cultural and religious resistance (the community's embrace of the work of gay, Jewish left-wing composer Marc Blitzstein). The chapter gives readers a deeper understanding of important elements of cantorial tradition, classical European tradition, and Jewish strategies for reaching out to the gentile mainstream and finding ways of making a living as musicians and composers in a variety of worlds. Particularly compelling is the portrait he paints of Julius Chajes, a piano prodigy, conductor, and composer who infused his compositions with...