Smith — Dancing in the Street

Author: Suzanne E. Smith
Title: Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit
Year: 1999
Type: Academic book (Harvard University Press)

Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit is a history by the historian Suzanne E. Smith, published by Harvard University Press in 1999. It argues that Motown has to be understood within Detroit’s history and its civil rights politics, against writers who treat the city as incidental to the company. It follows Motown from a small local label to an international business and reads it as a test of Black capitalism that, in Smith’s account, fell short of its promise to Black Detroit; the company left for Los Angeles in 1972. Its chapters run from Detroit’s Great March to Freedom through Black capitalism, Black cultural production and the Motown sound to Detroit in 1967 and the years after. Reviewers welcomed it, though Kirkus faulted its prose at times. It won third prize in the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Awards in 2000.

Smith joined George Mason University’s history department in 1995 and completed a doctorate in American studies at Yale in 1996.¹ Harvard University Press published the book with a 1999 date; Kirkus gives January 1, 2000, as its publication date.^{1, 2} Harvard’s description sets Motown in the Detroit of the 1960s, where “through it all, Motown provided the beat,” and presents the book as the story of Motown “as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon.”³

Most studies of Motown, Smith writes, ask how it won its audience, white listeners above all, and usually treat the civil rights movement as the backdrop to its appeal without tracing how the movement shaped Motown’s growth “from a small local record company into an international music industry giant.”⁴ Against the common view that Detroit was incidental to Motown, she argues that “situating the record company and its music within specific histories of Detroit provides clear parameters in which to analyze the complex relationships that existed among the Motown Record Company, its music, local activism, and the larger civil rights struggle.”⁴

The chapters run in order through “Motown and Detroit’s Great March to Freedom,” “Black Capitalism and Black Freedom in Detroit,” “Black Cultural Production in Detroit,” “The Motown Sound and the Politics of Black Culture,” “‘The Happening’: Detroit, 1967” and “Motown and New Detroit,” between an introduction, “Can’t Forget the Motor City,” and a conclusion, “Come Get These Memories.”⁵

On Berry Gordy’s company as a business, Smith writes that Motown’s records, drawn from Detroit’s Black neighborhoods, made it “a particularly powerful example of black economic independence.” “But Motown ultimately did not uphold the promise of black capitalism,” she continues, the promise that a successful Black business “would always support the local community that produced it.” By the late 1960s, in her account, the company had become one example of that promise’s limits, and its “controversial royalty practices, limited profit sharing with employees, and eventual decision to leave Detroit for Los Angeles illustrated how black capitalism did not ensure equity or preserve community.”⁴ Motown moved to Los Angeles in 1972, its sights set on film and television.⁴

Reviewers welcomed the book. Kirkus called it a “finely rendered history” of the Motown sound, though “Smith is occasionally dry or repetitive.”² Harvard’s publicity quotes Andrew Blake, in the Independent, writing that Smith “performs an act of historical rescue,” and Heather Ann Thompson, in Labor History, crediting her with “identifying just how powerful and malleable” Motown was “as a symbol of the tumultuous 1960s.”³ It was also reviewed by Brian Ward in the American Historical Review, Kenneth J. Bindas in the Michigan Historical Review, Michael Bertrand in the Journal of American History and Steve Waksman in American Quarterly.^{1, 6} The book won third prize in the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Awards in 2000.¹

Key contributions

• Motown set in Detroit’s civil rights history, against the view that the city was incidental to it.
• Motown as a test of Black capitalism, which by the late 1960s was falling short of its promise to Black Detroit.
• The company’s 1972 move to Los Angeles read as part of that story.

See also

• The Death of Rhythm and Blues — Nelson George’s 1988 history of Black music and crossover
• The pop factory — the idea of the hit factory, of which Motown is the model
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats