>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Judith Gray: Good afternoon.
I'm Judith Gray.
I'm the coordinator of reference for
the American Folklife Center here
at the Library of Congress.
And I'd like to welcome you
to the latest presentation
in our ongoing series, the Benjamin
A. Botkin Folklife Lecture Series,
which has been going on since 2003.
This series allows us to highlight
the work of leading scholars
in the disciplines of folklore,
ethnomusicology, oral history,
cultural anthropology, and
cultural heritage while specifically
enhancing the collections here
at the American Folklife Center.
For the Center and the Library,
the Botkin lectures
form an important facet
of our current acquisitions.
Each lecture is videotaped
and becomes part
of the permanent collections
of the Center.
In addition, the lectures
are later posted as webcasts
on the Library's website where
they're available for viewing
to Internet patrons
throughout the world.
That being said, let me remind you
at this point it would be a
good idea to turn off cellphones
and things that might buzz or
do other interesting things
to be captured permanently
on the record.
So today I have the honor
and the distinct pleasure
of introducing the distinguished
ethnomusicologist Dr. Mark Slobin,
who is the Winslow-Kaplan
Professor of Music
and American Studies
at Wesleyan University.
In the course of his career, Dr.
Slobin has written extensively
on a variety of subjects,
including Eastern European Jewish
and klezmer music,
global soundtracks,
and musical subcultures,
ethnomusicological practice
and theory, and the
music of Afghanistan,
where he conducted
research beginning in 1967.
He has served as the President of
the Society for Ethnomusicology
and the Society for Asian Music,
and as Editor of the
journal "Asian Music."
He's been the recipient of numerous
prizes, including the Seeger Prize
from the Society for
Ethnomusicology,
two ASCAP-Deems Taylor
Awards for his books,
the Jewish Cultural Achievement
Award for Lifetime Achievement
from the Foundation for Jewish
Culture, and the Curt Leviant Award
in Yiddish Studies from the
Modern Languages Association.
And in his spare time, during his
45 years as a university professor
at Wesleyan, he has also
trained a significant proportion
of today's ethnomusicologists, and
I have to say that includes me.
I can only wish all current
graduate students a mentor
as supportive and as
engaged as Mark.
Thank you very much.
So next month Mark will
be retiring from Wesleyan
where he was recently honored
with a day-long conference
celebrating his career
and many accomplishments.
And despite retiring from
full-time teaching though,
he shows no signs of slowing down.
And so looking ahead we
hope to see more of him here
in D.C. He says he hasn't been
invited of late -- he is now -- -
and especially to the
Library of Congress.
Today, however, he's going to be
looking backward to discuss some
of his earliest musical experiences.
And after the lecture he'll be
available for a book signing,
"Folk Music, A Very
Short Introduction,"
which will be available for sale
and for his signature right after.
So for the moment, please join me in
welcoming Mark Slobin for his talk
on Improvising Musical Metropolis,
Detroit, 1940s to the 1960s.
[ Applause ]
>> Mark Slobin: Thanks, it's great
to be here in these hallowed halls.
And as you've heard, I've worked on
many things over a very long career.
And for some reason
because Detroit was so much
in the news I kept
explaining it to people.
And I said, "Well," I said,
"Nobody understands this place."
I grew up there, and what would it
be like to study it a little bit
and see what the music culture was
really like in the city in my day?
So this is a curious project
because it's partly a
memoir, but it's not a memoir.
It's also a study of this
city -- the life of a city.
There is no book that is the life
of an American city's music
in any period of time.
We just don't do that.
So it's an interesting project.
So I'm going to give you a
certain update on what I'm up to.
And I'm writing the book now
that this will be based on.
What you find out when you
work on so many projects is
that your mind always
goes the same direction.
So I've always been interested
in small musical systems
that are embedded within
a larger system,
of many kinds of things going on,
and some overarching musical
structure in a society:
of what I've called micromusic.
So I began to realize
looking at Detroit I was --
it was really kind of
a micromusic study.
So I'm going to be explaining that.
And cities are extremely
complicated.
One of the great thinkers on cities,
Henri Lefebvre, French theorist,
says that, "The city unveils
a number of systems hidden
in the illusion of oneness.
And the city manifests
itself as a group of groups,
which is a situation of plurality,
coexistence, and simultaneity."
These are what I've
found in the music.
There's a very complex system
of interactive parts
in this great city.
So the talk is in four parts.
First I'll frame Detroit as
a city in my day and myself
as an actor -- as a person there.
Then I'll talk about this mainstream
of micromusical interactivity
within the city.
I've used the word
"superculture" in my writings
for this overarching structure
that one has, and then subcultures.
Then I'll look at some of the
micromusical systems themselves,
including my own community,
the Jewish community.
And then I'll talk
about some directions
for understanding musical --
urban musical spatiality, okay?
So first, what is Detroit?
What was it then?
Detroit grew later
and more explosively
than other Northern industrial
cities like Chicago and Cleveland.
It outgrew its modest status as
a kind of waterways crossroads
and site of small manufacturing--
ovens, typewriters--
only after 1910.
Doubled in size by 1920.
Doubled again by 1930.
So it's a very late,
very explosive growth.
And it owes it simply to one
factor, the success of Henry Ford
and his rivals in attracting
a huge proletarian workforce
to create a mass market
for the automobile.
Detroit has been called the
capital of the 20th century
because of the way it
defined modern production
and modern industrial life.
And somebody says it was in
a state of continuous flux
with as few stagnant moments
and interruptions as possible.
So this is a very dynamic
system I'm looking at,
not some kind of frozen,
industrial city.
Both the corporate systems
and the governmental systems,
part of this superculture, had to
improvise -- that's my title --
continuously and drastically by
the conditions that they created.
The invention of the automobile
and people using it itself
changed the conditions of life.
The scale of building was
unprecedented, actually.
And eventually we get
the first urban freeway
and the first shopping
center in America.
And by the 1950s, the twin
logics of capitalism and racism,
combined with arrogance
and short-sightedness,
destroyed Detroit's economic base,
making it the only American city
to both rise above and fall
below a million inhabitants.
Okay, the demographic key
to the city was the accelerated
arrival of three supergroups.
Internally they were very diverse,
but musically they
look kind of cohesive.
First, the European immigrants such
as my relatives, until the cutoff
of mass immigration in 1924.
Second -- the largest were 350,000
Polish Americans in this city
that got up to about 2 million.
Second, African Americans from
the South, who appeared later
and more intensively to
Detroit than other cities
as part of the Great Migration.
And third, white Southerners
who streamed in by the hundreds
of thousands, particularly
during the war years
when the population
explodes yet again.
These supercultures --
these subcultures, I say,
were also improvising: finding
ways to survive the rigors
of the workplace, manage
their communities,
create an expressive culture,
especially including music,
and get along with other immigrants.
Detroit was a pressure cooker, and
the heat was turned on too high.
It exploded in the
great wartime race riot
of 1943, just after I was born.
This was the only American
city to be occupied
by the U.S. Army three times.
I was just three months old
and spent the day -- maybe --
could we -- do you think
the front lights go down?
>> AFC staff member: Yeah.
>> Mark Slobin: It will
be interesting to see
if the front lights go down.
There I am just before the riot.
And we were in Belle Isle, this
beautiful island park of Belle Isle.
How did I get to be there?
My father was born in Detroit,
and his mother was born
in New York in 1890.
So on that side I'm
third-generation American-born.
But everybody else came
from Southern Ukraine.
A few family photos will show
the pathway to America and a kind
of assimilation in how I became kind
of a mixed subcultural
and mainstream person.
So I'll just run through
a few photos here.
This is my father's parents
having their honeymoon.
If you were immigrants in
1910 you go to Niagara Falls
for your honeymoon, even
if it looks like that.
And you see the industrial
smoke from the Nabisco factory,
and what it means to
be an immigrant.
She was only 19 there.
She looks a great deal older.
And here is the -- my mother's side.
That's my mother, the
little girl, in Ukraine.
At the same time, right in the
same -- just a couple years later.
And she got to America.
And then my parents' honeymoon is
of course, they're Americans now.
And they go see New York and
go to the Statue of Liberty.
Okay, and then there's my growing
up as an American-slash-subcultural
person.
So what does this mean?
It means cowboys and Indians.
Okay, so here I am
wearing my cowboy thing,
and there's my little friend
David Droffler [assumed spelling]
with his headdress.
Okay, this is what it
means to be American, okay,
is to be bouncing off
subcultural issues.
Here I am as a mainstream
person, okay.
This is -- and my mother
is just great.
She wrote, "Superman,
1946," you know,
so I know exactly what
these things are.
So here -- so that's
also mainstream, okay,
popular culture is mainstream.
And then we went to Mexico,
so then I get to be a gringo
and an American tourist.
Okay, all coming out of this
immigrant kind of roots.
But this is what America means.
It's a set of stereotypes
and activities that relate
to popular culture
and so forth, okay.
Okay, so all right,
we'll go back here.
Right, so I left the
Detroit area for --
from nearby Ann Arbor where I got
my doctorate after I was in --
I went off to do Afghanistan.
It was just at the same
time as the -- another riot.
So I'm kind of framed by these
rebellions, or uprisings,
or whatever they're
called in 1943 and 1967.
Detroit has barely survived
the aftershocks and the decline
of these various explosions,
trying literally, actually,
to crawl out of the rubble,
even as the unconcerned suburbs
thrive very well in the area.
It's very hard for me to map
my city onto what I see today,
but that's another story.
Okay, so we'll get to part two now,
the life of music in
this metropolis.
And here I'm concentrating on
what I've called the superculture,
which in this case is
the educational system --
music education.
Detroit's combination
of dynamic growth
and tense social negotiation
was nowhere more apparent
than in the designed space -- and
Lefebvre talks about designed space
and lived space -- but public
schools are part of designed space.
High school music showcases the
stability and the turbulence
of a rapidly-changing city.
I'm going to single out two schools.
One is Miller High
where my father taught.
He was a school teacher in 1937.
And Cass Tech, my alma mater,
and that of countless important
musicians from Ron Carter
and Diana Ross, through
Geri Allen and Jack White.
All these people went
to Cass Tech, okay.
Its music program is extraordinary.
So the overlap and the
distinctions between Miller High
and Cass Tech give me a really
nice platform for talking
about a lot of musical issues.
And I have some first-hand
experience as well.
So, actually, you can look
at American literature
on public school music.
In 1941, "The WPA Guide
to Michigan" said,
"Pioneer work in public school
music has been important
to the entire nation."
And then in 1940 a book called,
"High School Music" presents Cass
Tech's curriculum in the survey
of renowned programs in America.
And here is the ideology:
"Nothing is more significant
of the increasing socialization of
education than the rapid extinction
of instrumental study in
connection with schools.
Playing upon an instrument is not
merely a personal accomplishment
with individual benefits,
but is a social power
which affects many persons in
addition to the performer."
So this is very strong ideology
about the importance
of instrumental music.
At Miller High, this attractive
version of Americanization
through music was largely foreclosed
by the Board of Education.
Miller had been a junior high,
was changed to senior in 1933
to accommodate the huge influx
of African American students.
The white parents were notified.
They could move their
children out of the district.
So the school quickly
became all black.
This impacted the music.
There's a wonderful interview
I found in a dissertation
with a music teacher who would have
been a colleague of my father's,
Ms. Dolman [assumed spelling].
"In 1940," she says, "the
Board removed all the classical
instruments from Miller,
sending them to other schools
whose students' background
and breeding would lend them better
to cultured classical music."
So if you wonder why Milt
Jackson played the vibes instead
of the cello, this might
be -- he went to Miller.
There -- you know, there are
some really precise things here.
Things didn't work out that way due
to the dedication of the teachers
who struggled and succeed in
supporting all these amazing kids
who were coming through Miller.
"High School Music" says,
"The aim of instrumental study
in schools is principally cultural
and social, and only incidentally
and remotely vocational."
Okay, but Ms. Dolman
says something else.
She says, "Music classes were
business classes for our kids.
They practiced long and hard
to develop their skills,
and that's why Kenneth
Burrell and William Evans" --
later Yusef Lateef --
"Milton Jackson, and
several others are recognized
as being the best at
their instruments."
I can't help mentioning my father
actually taught American History
to Kenny Burrell, and probably
many other future Jazz greats,
when he was in Miller.
"Milt Jackson in his dissertation
notes that had he not dropped
out of high school he probably
would have gotten a college music
scholarship like a lot
of his classmates did."
Dolman's eyewitness account is in
this remarkable 1970 dissertation
by Clauzel [assumed spelling] Jones,
and they opposed the establishment.
"High School Music" again
says, "America does not have
that racial solidarity
which favors the development
of peculiar musical idioms.
While we've discovered interesting
folk music among the Indians
and Negroes and make use of it and
enjoy it, yet it cannot be said
that this is typical of the American
people at any period [laughter]."
Now Ms. Dolman's response of this
erasure of subcultural tradition was
to help build a model for
success in establishment music.
She tells us that the African
American students couldn't get buses
to go to the competitions,
but they went anyway,
and they would win the
all-city band contests.
"They could read and play all
types of music, even the Mozart
that the bigshots downtown
felt was not akin
to their heritage," she says.
Dolman -- oh, wait.
I have a picture of this
which I'm not showing you.
Okay, so here's Miller High.
And up in Fine Arts here,
Fine Arts, we have --
woops, get this -- Ms. Dolman here.
And then under Social Studies
we have my father here, okay.
So -- and his friends.
These were all people who came
over to our house all the time.
The -- this huge mass of Jewish
school teachers in Detroit.
Dolman also made use of black
resources right in the building.
She brought in a janitor
to help train her chorus.
And I presume this is somebody
who probably had church gospel
singing background, or was helpful
with her training courses.
I site her because we
have her testimony.
She's not famous like the great
Luis Cabrera who Yusef Lateef
and Kenny Burrell site
as really important
in their musical formation, who
was also teaching at Cass Tech.
And I'll bring Cabrera back later.
The supportive music of Miller
High, which only lasts until 1957,
offers a striking compliment
to the general urban trajectory
of Detroit marked by black
neighborhood destruction
for freeways to the
newly-built suburbs,
relocation of housing
projects, and a combination
of heavy-handed policing
and economic neglect.
So music shows us that the
superculture systems, however,
are not hegemonic wholes,
but they're partial systems
with cracks that offer alternatives.
We should not forget the musical
families like the McKinneys
of Detroit and the Joneses --
and we're talking Thad Jones,
Elvin Jones, that family -- that
nurtured talent outside of school.
The pianist Barry Harris,
who was himself to this day,
in his late 80s, an
influential teacher,
as a teenager taught all
the other kids stuff.
And I asked him, I said,
"What about what you learned
at school in what you learned?"
And he said, "Outside,"
he said, "well,
at school we just learned
stock arrangements."
But as street musicians, he
says, they picked up the skills
in the neighborhood and
among these families.
So you have a very complicated kind
of superculture/subculture
relationship going on.
Cass Tech offers a
different model of patronage.
It was the magnet school for
the entire city of Detroit.
There was one gigantic
magnet school.
It was eight stories high,
occupied a huge downtown space.
And it wanted to let kids advance
from every subculture
simultaneously.
By 1926 business leaders
could praise Cass
as "A monumental achievement
of education and architecture
of which any city would be proud."
This included those art programs
that are in high school music.
And Cass Tech's own literature
says that they "placed students
in enviable positions
in symphony orchestras,
concert bands, radio
and dance bands."
So this is teens, '20s, '30s.
As those positions dried
up in the post-war period,
the emphasis shifted to preparing
students to be music teachers,
creating a very constructive
cycle of educational continuity
that I've been looking at.
Cass Tech's alums readily
and universally praise the
school's music training.
They, quote, "are affectionate
and loyal to Detroit."
Now one doesn't think Detroit's
a place people are affectionate
and loyal by [laughter].
It's supposed to be this gritty
city we barely escaped from.
But when you look in music you
get a different storyline, right?
And alongside African American
students, the white students
at Cass Tech were on a jazz trek.
They were recruited straight out
of the classroom in the early '40s,
so the Tommy Dorsey
and Sam Kenton bands.
Some of these kids
were Polish Americans,
and some went on to
fuel the engine of polka
that energized their huge
population, which I'll get to.
There's a great history of all this
by a woman named Lori Gomulka
whose father was a big-time
polka musician.
She quotes this one band leader,
Stan Visniok [assumed spelling],
about Cass Tech, "When I
heard that concert band,
tears just rolled down my eyes.
Boy, I'm going to be a part of this.
It just warmed my heart."
Apparently the students would
skip school to hear Tommy Dorsey
at the nearby Fox Theater.
The music teachers would also turn
up, and take attendance, and stay.
[ Laughter ]
So this is serious music training.
And then, you know, some of
these kids we would get hired.
So they could move out to New
York or people could move back
to their home neighborhoods
out of this.
They were both kind of
viable career options
that Cass Tech made available.
African Americans really
benefitted from this rigorous
yet open-minded curriculum.
Ron Carter -- Ronald Carter,
I have him on the programs,
trained in classical chamber music.
I know people who played
string quartets with him
on the cello at Cass Tech.
And this carried on through
the work of Marcus Belgrave
who was brought late in the
game, and who taught Geri Allen.
Geri Allen's most recent album,
"Grand River Crossing" is
about crossing this huge street
in Detroit that I know very well.
She says in her album, "At Cass
Tech we didn't just have a few music
classes, we had three
years of intensive training
by master teachers, the Detroit
Artist-in-Residence, for the fields
of the classics, old and modern
jazz, spirituals, and the blues."
So note the blending of
the kind of superculture
and subcultural musics within this.
Regina Carter is another
Belgrave student.
She combines her subcultural
heritage and school training
on her recent album
"Southern Comfort."
She's really interesting.
She has pieces that are
written around memories
of her childhood trips
back to Alabama
from Detroit on family visits.
And she uses '30s field
recordings from nearby
to where we are sitting
in the recording.
So she's combining her Cass Tech
technical, classical training
with the sounds of the
cotton field in this kind
of very interesting way,
which is a very Detroit story.
For other types of
subcultural students who --
you had to qualify to get to Cass
Tech -- the white Southerners,
the Jews, Italians,
Armenians, Greeks, Serbs,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
The grounding in theory
and the ensembles became a
gateway to different careers.
One of my orchestra-mates was
the cornetist Hachig Kazarian,
who is an absolute icon of Armenian
American music for 50 years.
He said he learned more about
mainstream music at Cass than he did
at Julliard, which
he dropped out of.
He got on this track
by going directly
from school to jobs at ethnic bars.
Another guy in the orchestra,
before my time, Rodney Glusac,
said he started a Serbian band
with two classmates in 1951,
and they broke up in
2009 [laughter].
So music survives dislocation
and suburbanization
when a subculture knows
what it wants
from its school-trained musicians.
And this is the part of
the story I'm telling.
Education moved these kids off
the path to the assembly line,
though some of them still had
to log time at factories to get
by if the music work dried up.
And various people
have told me that.
One said, "Cass saved me from
the Detroit industrial ghetto."
Like stand-mate Darwin
Apple [assumed spelling],
an African American violinist,
was the only one in the orchestra,
and the first one in some
major orchestras in America,
and he was glad to leave an
industrial future for a position
in a major symphony orchestra.
Most of these kids were immigrants
from Europe or the American South.
The renowned violinist
sisters Ida and Ani Kavafian,
standbys at Lincoln Center
music, were born in Istanbul.
My successful buddies Daryl
and Robert Barnes [assumed spelling]
actually came from Kentucky.
And against the hillbilly stereotype
that you might have, their mother,
who was from Lexington, was a
professional French horn player
who was in the Detroit
symphony when she had to quit
because she couldn't be a mom
and a professional in those days.
And both those boys ended up
in the Philadelphia Orchestra
and the Boston Symphony,
coming from Kentucky.
Okay, so this nexus, this
convergence that happened say
in classical music is something
that really, really interests me.
And my friend Rita Sloan [assumed
spelling] that I knew very well came
as a refugee after the war, from
displaced person camps to Detroit.
Her family decided they had to have
a piano, and gave it its own room
in their house, so she had to double
up with her sister [laughter].
So this is the kind of
value systems that were --
came with families that I'm
also very interested in.
Okay, so now that brings
me to part three,
more on the actual
internal subcultural space
of these communities.
So there are three books
that actually help me on it,
because there is no literature
on the city of Detroit to read.
I mean, anything about the city of
Detroit: sociology, urban history,
there's like fewer than this
many books that are worth reading
about the city of Detroit.
Such a major place,
it's just unbelievable.
And on music, fortunately in
recent years three books came out.
One was called, "Before Motown,"
which is the history of jazz
in Detroit, "Before
Motown," very, very helpful.
There's one this -- Lori's
book on Polish American music,
and one called "Detroit
Country Music"
on the white Southern community.
So this makes it possible for me
to do a little work that I'll lay
out for you and make some maps.
I had some GIS maps
made by students.
And this is just I'm -- they're
not like statistically viable,
but these books are
done by enthusiasts
who tell you what club
everybody played in,
and where the addresses were.
I love books like this.
And then you can actually use
them to construct some kind
of geographic spatial sense.
So I'll give you a
little bit of this.
This is a map that combines
Polish versus country music.
And you can see that the country
music is more the star-shaped
things, and the Polish
music is more concentrated.
And country music is
all over the city
because there was this huge
scattered population; where somebody
like the Poles, who were
basically in their enclave
of this city-within-a-city called
Hamtramck, but they overlap
in the downtown spaces,
which are the clubs,
the radio studios,
recording studios.
So you can see that in this kind
of just spread of those maps.
You know, to the extent
you can map this properly.
Here's another one that I was
able to get out of this book,
"[Detriot] Country Music."
Where were these born,
and where did they play?
And you can see they're all
born in the absolute heartland
of what would be country music,
you know, with a few exceptions.
Mostly Kentucky, Tennessee,
West Virginia.
And then you can see
where they traveled.
And just like in Detroit,
these people are traveling all
over the country, as are the Serb
musicians and the Polish musicians,
because there's networks.
So every group has its network.
The -- of course, the white Southern
music networks probably more last
than some of these ethnic
networks which wouldn't have
as many different spots
on the circuits, right.
So I'm only going to play little
tiny bit of music in this talk
because I'm doing so
many other things.
But I'll give you two
subcultural examples
that are very, very indicative.
The first is from the African
American music community,
which was centered for an entire
generation on Hastings Street.
And actually my father
lived on Hastings Street
when he was a small child, before
this wave of the Great Migration.
There was a Jewish
neighborhood there.
So I know about Hastings Street.
And there is a song by a
guy named Detroit Count.
His real name was Robert White.
He came from Chattanooga.
And he did a song called
"Hastings Street Opera."
I have to credit Dick Spotswood
for finding me this, of course.
And "Hastings Street Opera" is this
piece where he lists every bar --
it's two sides of a 78, and
he runs out before he ...
[laughter] -- Yusef Lateef said,
"Not even Detroit Count could have
covered all the places there were."
That's how many joints there were.
So I'll give you just a
little flavor of that.
It's hard to understand
him, of course.
But let's see, okay.
I'll get to this.
Oops, no, no, no, no.
Go back, go back.
All right, here we go.
[ Recorded music: Robert White
playing blues piano with lyrics:
"Hasting Street Opera: Joints
All Round Hastings Street..."
]
This is on YouTube, so I urge
you to listen to the rest of it.
That's an amazing piece of music,
and it's deep Detroit, okay.
The second little example of -- it
comes from the Southern white world.
This is 1939, but it talks on
inter-subcultural relations,
which in Detroit, you
know, would lead to riots.
But the so-called hillbillies, the
white Southerners, did not get along
with the older Catholic
European populations--
the Poles and these Appalachian
people did not get along at all.
The most famous country
group that lived in and out
of Detroit was the York Brothers,
and they came out with a
song called "Hamtramck Mama."
No I showed you Hamtramck on
the map as this, you know,
fortress of Polish culture.
So here is the York
Brothers referencing of --
no, no, no, no [laughter].
Why is this thing so twitchy?
All right.
You're going to play this, right?
Oh, I turned down the sound.
[ Music: male duet: lyrics with
string instrument accompaniment ]
The Mayor of Hamtramck tried to get
it banned from airplay [laughter].
It was not a happy situation.
So this gives you some sense
of the subcultural activity,
and I'm going to talk a little bit
about my own subcultural space.
My group positioned
itself on the frontier,
the border between superculture
and subculture very deliberately.
The Jews turned inward
musically in their own practices,
and I'll talk about that.
But they also pushed resolutely
outward into the mainstream
as a part of a generalized policy.
The Jews encapsulate the anxieties
and achievements in minority agency
in ways that differ from
these other activities
of all these other groups
I've been mentioning.
The community mushroomed in the
1910s, jumping in a few years
from 10,000 to 50,000, including
my grandfather and great-uncles,
and peaked at around 90,000.
So it was a pretty large
minority within Detroit.
They were all in a
single neighborhood,
and they were deeply divided
on all kinds of lines.
One scholar says, "Different voices
seem to cry out in disharmony
for resolutions to a confusing
mixture of problems and questions,"
about the Jewish community.
And I think anybody who
knows a Jewish community,
this pretty much right.
So I can talk about
two little trends:
One is the extroverted
tendency to push outward
in classical music
cosmopolitanism and the kind
of interior religious practice.
The newly-emancipated
Jews of Europe,
starting around 1800 used
European classical music as a way
to join the mainstream in ways that
are strategic but also deeply-felt.
You think of Mendelssohn and Mahler.
But also all the orchestra
members and the audience
that supported classical music
in Berlin, in Vienna, Odessa,
Kiev, Warsaw, every city.
And there is no book on
this, which is amazing.
There's no book about that.
I started violin lessons
at the age of four, right.
>> Audience: Aww!
>> Mark Slobin: And I
had already been to --
I asked, "I want to
play the violin,"
because I already had
seen Jascha Heifetz
and Mischa Elman at this age.
Here I am on my way
to my first lesson.
Let's see, here's my first concert
-- first -- this is in high school.
Then at Cass Tech, right?
Yeah, okay, now we go back.
And that is the interior world.
Okay, my parents' social circle
gathered at the orchestra concerts,
and the Jewish community kept the
Detroit Symphony Orchestra alive
when the flickering interest
of the city's auto moguls
endangered the organization.
They came to this late.
It's Detroit.
It's not Chicago and
Cleveland, you know.
There was no orchestra hall.
They -- I mean, that's
another story.
If I had time I would tell
you, which is very amusing.
And they get this, but they, like,
pulled their money out of it.
So the Jews wanted it to happen.
A couple of people, including
two of my violin teachers,
organized a chamber symphony --
a chamber orchestra
called the Little Symphony
that kept things running.
They gave concerts at an
upscale Jewish restaurant
when there was no Detroit Symphony.
At another time a guy called
Sams Cutright kept sponsorship
of the symphony going.
Community ladies had organized
the Music Study Club in the 1920s,
which paralleled the
non-Jewish Tuesday Musicale
that went back to the 1880s.
And I was in that crowd.
We played at Music
Study Club gatherings,
and they gave scholarships
for child prodigies
who went off to have big careers.
One of the interesting moments was
the decision to hire a classical --
a Jewish composer from Vienna named
Julius Hais [uncertain spelling]
who was charged with, in 1940,
to organize a professional-level
orchestra and a music school
at the Jewish Community
Center, which was very linked
to Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
So there's this parallel
establishment and integration
of the Jewish community with the
mainstream community at this level.
He's also bringing in -- he had
lived in Palestine, so he's bringing
in Palestine sound and Zionist
things in his own compositions.
He gets the Detroit Symphony
Orchestra to do a Jewish Music Week.
Very complicated.
They're playing in black churches.
There's a lot of outreach.
He couldn't control everything.
As I was looking through the
newspaper, the Detroit Jewish News,
1942, Hias [spelling
uncertain] is giving a concert
with a black church.
And on the same page it's announced
that the Jewish Center cub pack
will be putting on a minstrel show.
So [laughter] it's a
rather complicated set
of relationships say in 1942.
So this epitomizes the
dynamism, the complexity
of American Jewish musical life
that look both outward and inward
in a turbulent century that saw
the restriction of immigration,
the Holocaust, establishment
of the State of Israel.
But Detroit was the most
anti-Semitic city in America.
Henry Ford funded vicious
propaganda, and the publication
of the Elders - "Protocol
of the Elders of Zion."
The radio priest Father
Coughlin was inveighing
against the Jews every week
to millions across America.
Three was a plot by the
Michigan Black Legion
to murder a million Jews by
planting bombs in every synagogue
across America on Yom Kippur.
Okay, so I'm learning what
my parents were living
through in this city
in their cultural life.
But they also kept their
traditional channels
of music, and that was that photo.
Here I am, my father's teaching me
how to do my bar mitzvah chanting.
And I had a really
interesting experience
of a grad student named
Garrett Field,
who was a specialist
in South Asian music.
And he said, "I want to do a
paper on" -- I said, "On what?"
He said, "I want to talk about this
synagogue boys' choir I was in."
I said -- I had no idea
he was even Jewish.
I said, "Where was that?"
And he said, "Detroit."
I said, "What synagogue?"
He said, "B'nai Moshe," which
is where I was bar mitzvah!
And I said, "Sure," you know, right.
So he and his brother
were deeply affected
by the Cantor there
named Cantor Louis Klein.
One of my projects was the history
of the American Cantorate
that I did.
And Louis Klein actually
was a contributor
to that project, so
I knew who he was.
He was another immigrant.
He grew up in Romania.
He came by Belgium and London.
And in Detroit he sang,
you know, on radio and TV.
He'd concert at Catholic retreats.
He was another one
of these immigrants
like Hias who he was musicality.
But he's using it in the system
of ancient Hebrew sacred music.
So I'll read you two little
quotes from the Field brothers
about the experience
of being in the choir.
"As a young boy raised in a
conservative Jewish family,
I could sense the High
Holidays just around the corner.
The air became cooler, and
the leaves began to color.
Soon I would be on the bimah,"
the platform of the synagogue,
"with my boys' choir cohorts,
circled around the shuhan
[spelling uncertain] on the table
on which the Torah scroll sits,
accompanied by the
hazzan Louis Klein."
The other one says, "I
remember the excitement
and nervousness before
heading onstage when we sat
with our families, like secretive
spies with alternate identities.
One second the humble and
anonymous son of the Field family,
and a minute later, zam!, a
regular mini-Cantor belting
out sonorous renditions of
traditional Jewish songs
for the audience of
fellow congregants.
We had done something great,
and exciting, and memorable.
It was like a secret proud
friendship and comradeship."
So this is a really
wonderful statement
about an internal subcultural life
at the same time that they're doing
as much outreach as they can.
So I'm going to close here with part
four here, some little reflections
on the notion of urban spatiality
and music, and the relationships
of all these, because I'm, you
know, mapping out this vast area,
and I'm trying to find some
kinds of ways of doing that.
Before the Internet,
then, a large urban area
like Detroit was a fairly bounded
system, even if it was plugged
into like national and international
circuits of family and marketing.
And Lefebvre talks about
the imagined space,
which is the imagined
idea of the city,
the designed space,
and the lived space.
And this plurality
co-existence and simultaneity.
Music operates among
all these world.
It's -- it flows into
all kinds of channels.
So I'm just going to give you two
little moments that suggest the --
what I find the interesting
issues around some of this,
using Yusef Lateef, who was one
of the most influential
musical Detroiters.
In the mid-'50s, Lateef was
drawn to Islam at a time
when he was also trying to expand
the instruments he could play.
He was tired of the
standard jazz instruments.
He picked up the rebab,
the North African fiddle.
So you would say, "Well,
he went into Islam.
He found this North African fiddle
because of Islamic connections.
And he was" -- but no.
It was an Arab American
coworker on the line
at the Chrysler factory, okay.
Now this is a real Detroit story,
then speaking of the comradery
of the polyglot workforce
of the auto industry.
For Lateef the rebab was different
from what I'm calling
inherently-available resources
he had.
This is what you grow up with
and what you have available,
what you have in the family,
and what you get in school.
These are things that are
inherently available to you.
But then there are other things
which I'm calling adjacent
resources.
The factory allowed for
the nearness of a music
that might have been the third
category, my inaccessible resources.
So there are adjacent resources --
inherent ones, adjacent ones that
are around there that you might run
into and use, and ones that are
for whatever reason simply
not accessible to you at all,
physically or conceptually.
This reminds me -- his experience
reminds me in a passage in a poem
by Philip Levine, which was the
great American poet from Detroit.
And I'm using poetry, and
literature, and other things
to try to flesh this out.
He happened to have to work on
the assembly line a little bit,
and he writes about, "My
friend Marion, the ex-junkie
and novice drop-forge worker, off
by himself, humming "Body and Soul."
He played with Hawkins
before his troubles,
and now has four 10-inch
Bluebirds left to prove it."
Hawkins here is Coleman
Hawkins, a major figure.
And the bluebirds are these
records that you've got over here.
It's a famous jazz record label.
So the adjacency of the workplace
gives Philip Levine access
to a friend of his who used
to play with Coleman Hawkins.
So it's something like
that Lateef story.
The second one is about me
and Lateef in a funny way.
At the end of the '50s I used to
clutch my violin case at 6:45 a.m.
on a cold corner to catch the
Dexter bus down to Cass Tech
to get there for orchestra
rehearsal.
After white flight I was
living in a neighborhood
that by then had only
7% of Detroit's Jews,
and everybody else
was African American.
And I would see this club with
a glass front, you looked in.
It was called the Minor Key.
And there would be
hand-lettered signs
in the window saying
Yusef Lateef, you know,
John Coltrane, or whatever.
And in fact, I've checked.
Yes, Lateef played
the Minor Key then,
exactly when I would
have been standing there.
Because -- so this was
adjacent physically to me,
but the Minor Key was not
available to me conceptually
because I had all this
inherently-available music starting
with Russian songs, Gilbert and
Sullivan, many things that I had
in classical music which were
physically extremely far away,
but conceptually inherent
and close to me.
But here was this thing
that was physically close
which was conceptually distant.
It never occurred to me to
step inside to hear the music,
so I missed all of the
Golden Age of jazz.
And I know other kids --
I've mentioned this to kids
that went to school with me.
And they said, "Oh, we just to
be in the Minor Key all the time
because they -- Kenny,
the son of the manager,
was this kid in our high school,
this Jewish kid, and you know,
we used to go to the Minor Key."
Really? So -- and there was this
other guy I talked to, he said he
and his buddy used to
walk into bluegrass clubs
because they were tired of what
they learned from like Pete Seeger
from guitar and banjo, and they
wanted to hear what the real people,
how they played those instruments.
And I would never do this.
So they -- this is a more
aggressive notion of adjacency
than I somehow could muster up.
And finally kids introduced me to
jazz, but I couldn't understand why
on the wall of Cass Tech
it said "Bird Lives!"
I had no idea what this meant.
Charlie Parker had just died then,
and you know, I said, "What's that?"
you know. Okay, but I began
to get into jazz, right.
But if you look back farther
it turns out that Cabrera,
the great teacher of Lateef and
I, actually shared a program.
So here's my mother's
thing, Mark's first concert.
No, that's where I am
going to my first concert--
you can see I'm nervous, right?
Let's see, here's the program.
Mark's first concert.
You'll see that the -- I'm in
the all-city junior orchestra,
but you'll also see that the
-- there's something conducted
and arranged by Luis
Cabrera on the same program.
So I actually kind
of shared this space,
which was then not
a conceptual space;
it was a physical space, okay.
And then one more anecdote of
this, and then I'll wrap up.
At an early convention of Society
for Ethnomusicology I met a young
African American ethnomusicologist
named Sylvia Kinney.
Turned out she was a Detroiter.
She lived two blocks away from me,
and she loved the music in Detroit
and talked about the great
Emancipation Day concerts,
which I had never heard of
and never would have gone to.
That is what I would call an
inaccessible resource to me,
even though for her it was
something really important
that happened every year.
Okay, so -- and of course,
many African Americans had many
experiences with inaccessibility
because of conditions
of American life,
including in the musical realm.
So that's part of this complexity.
So cities offer conceptual spaces
and concrete sites,
but not neutrally.
It's not just the designed
city of the street grid.
In Detroit all the players,
individuals, groups,
the establishment, created and
pushed the limits of availability--
physically and imaginatively.
Music could be heard or
unheard, mandated or without,
like the instruments from Miller,
according to largely unwritten
rules of improvisation.
Collaboration and separation
coexisted
in a constantly-shifting
landscape within a community,
between neighborhoods, and citywide.
And Detroit is, of course,
famous for its mobility, created
and promoted by a capitalist
drive that people had to work
around with -- work
with or work around.
Many of these forms are still
around in Greater Detroit,
at least 20 miles from where
they started, but ethnic --
older ethnic genres have declined.
And if you can't hear
musicians except at festivals
or shared venues, you can't
exchange things the way you could
in the 1940s when my friend the
great American composer Gordon
[inaudible] grew up around.
He used to take the bus downtown
from his white high school
in the suburbs to listen
to the music in the city.
Nobody does that in
Detroit today, okay.
Mass transit allowed for
adjacency, and there was less fear.
I'm not saying it was a better
musical model, because one of the --
I almost didn't start this project
because I'm fighting nostalgia,
and I didn't want to get into that.
But I'm trying to show the richness
of exploring the inner musical
workings of an American city not
yet exploded by white flight
and the triumph of the freeway.
The last phase of the
dominance of the Northeast
of an almost desperate style of
social and industrial engineering
and intense, close-up
interaction of an older collection
of American subcultures
with modernity.
It's a good site for spatiality
studies because it's so tight.
It's 1910, and by 1970 it's over.
When Detroit was a byword
for power, not ruin.
And for their manic musical
momentum that we all know
of because we all hear
Motown songs like every day.
So we were the first to
see the new model cars
and hear the just-released
future hit songs.
It seems I was lucky to grow up
there, and I'm looking forward to,
you know, continuing this research.
Thanks.
[ Applause ]
>> Judith Gray: We'll
take some questions.
>> Mark Slobin: So if you've got
any questions about all this.
>> Male audience member:
Hello, Professor.
Thank you again for -- my
name's John [inaudible] we met.
Thank you for an illuminating,
interesting
and poignant talk [inaudible]
I'll try
to keep my comments short
-two minutes at more.
I'm a lifelong Washingtonian,
so I actually [inaudible]
resident, I mean, I sensed that.
It's kind of, for lack
of a better phrase,
crossover, and sort of mix --
>> Mark Slobin: Yeah,
that's very American.
>> Yes. As someone who's 47 now,
I [inaudible] like the friend
you described toward the end,
the kid who took the bus downtown.
I did that often myself just
in terms of like where I grew
up in [inaudible] Maryland,
so I would take the subway,
or I would bike down to
the Mall and so forth.
And my parents are like yours,
immigrants, you know, from Columbia.
But I never -- I didn't really --
I know [inaudible] consciously
of my immigrant status,
but it wasn't something I took
upon as an immigrant side,
I was [inaudible] because
in some ways I gave me a bit
of an outside -- not outsider,
but more like an objective opinion
about like how past history,
but also a willingness
to explore [inaudible] how
I feel about certain things.
And that [inaudible] your talk.
Here in D.C. it's also
[inaudible] the idea
of Go-Go music, for example.
Really [inaudible] D.C. that would
not be quite necessarily known about
or exposed about people who
would necessarily know about it.
Look at [inaudible] that --
>> Mark Slobin: Right, so
these things that are not known
or not available, and other
things that -- it just...
>> Male audience member
continues: -- yeah.
It may seem -- you know,
[inaudible] racial.
I was trying to [inaudible] comment,
but sometimes it's just simply --
I joke about Robert DeNiro once said
that if you don't --
"If you go, you'll know.
If you don't go, you don't know.
If you don't know, you don't know."
I mean, literally you go
somewhere, you'll find out.
You don't go, well, you stay home
and read about it, but you know.
I'll stop there I just
wanted say that.
For the sake of brevity
I'll stop there.
>> Mark Slobin: Sure, sure.
Yeah, no, no.
That's interesting.
Every city has its history,
and we just don't have
these histories, you know.
>> Female audience member:
[inaudible] I'm from Detroit myself.
>> Mark Slobin: Oh, wow.
>>Female audience member:
And I remember going
down to Baker's Keyboard Lounge.
>> Mark Slobin: Right.
>> Female audience member;
-- down to Cass Corridor,
all those bars down there.
And I also lived in
Hamtown for several years.
>> Mark Slobin: Okay, right.
Well, it was this amazing
musical city.
>> Nancy Groce: Can you talk
a little bit about radio?
And did radio have impact?
Or how did --
>> Mark Slobin: There
actually is a book!
The one -- the only other book
there is is called "Rocking
Down the Dial," and it's one
of these enthusiast
histories of radio in Detroit.
So I actually know
something about that,
because otherwise how do you
find these histories in America?
Nobody keeps archives of radios and
what happens on the radio, you know.
And everybody throws out the tapes,
and the recordings, and you know.
So this guy actually did this.
He went through all these
stations, and what they did,
and when they restricted having R &
B and wouldn't possibly have it on,
and when they realized
that there was a big market
for this among kinds of black
youth, and that they would --
it's like, "Yeah we ought
to be putting this on."
And then there's this amazing
African American woman disk jockey,
who was influential.
And but one of the --
>> Male audience member:
Martha Jean the Queen!
>> Mark Slobin: Exactly,
Martha Jean the Queen, right.
So it's -- one of the themes
I get from everybody talking
about Detroit -- and it may
be true of other cities,
but Detroiters particularly
stress it --
and its apparent when
you look in Motown --
is that it was a city of open ears.
It was a city where everybody
listened to lots of stuff.
And these DJs -- there was a DJ,
Electrifying Mojo, and he would play
like [Karftwerker?]
and things like this
that African American
teenagers would listen
to because it was that station.
You know, and German
industrial rock or things.
And there was the idea that,
"Yeah, yeah, we listened."
We knew. We heard stuff
from all over.
Even if you couldn't go to
those clubs or you couldn't play
in those places or
whatever, you heard it all.
And radio offered that.
There was ethnic radio,
although a lot of it got cut.
When they realized there
was more money in rock
and roll they really cut a lot
of ethnic radio, but it survived
in some ways, as it
did in every city.
I mean, partly it's the
story of every city.
But you know, more intense
here because when you get --
you get like Motown,
right, and this, you know,
immense kind of energy
of creating an industry.
The first ever African American,
you know, music industry,
so to speak of, you know, that was
local, where they drew everybody in.
So these violin teachers of mine,
they were the Motown string section.
And those are stories that
are really interesting.
And they took jazz.
They took classical.
They took everybody, you know,
into the system that they created
which paralleled as
an industrial system,
was paralleling the auto
industry very directly.
That's a real Detroit story.
And that part of it appeals to me.
>> Male audience member: There's
another thing that interests me.
I grew up in Birmingham, and you --
>> Mark Slobin: Yeah,
yeah, yeah, right.
>>Make audience member: -- had to
take the Greyhound bus downtown just
to watch a couple movies or
watch Louie Armstrong onstage.
>> Mark Slobin: Well, there you go.
You're another one of
those, right, yeah.
>> Male audience member: [Inaudible]
a lot of the clubs, French,
the Flame, a whole
bunch, the Drone --
>> Mark Slobin: Great, yeah.
These were the -- yeah, these
were the major -- right.
>> Male audience member: But you
know, one thing that happened,
it seems to me, that I was
told by black friends from --
67, it was the dividing line
of being able to go to clubs.
And black friends of my
general economic background,
they said for them it was not
welcoming to go to the clubs
that we always used to go
to as a shared experience.
>> Mark Slobin: Oh, okay.
>> Male audience member:
But the riots --
>> Mark Slobin: But they weren't
welcome in the white clubs?
>> Male audience member:
There were welcome.
They didn't feel welcome
in the black clubs.
>> Mark Slobin: In the black clubs?
Oh, the white people didn't feel --
>>Male audience member: No, I'm
talking about black middle-class --
>> Mark Slobin: Oh, all right.
>>Male audience member: -- black.
>> Mark Slobin: I see.
Yeah.
>> Male audience member: Felt
that they weren't welcome
as much in the black clubs.
I thought that was a watershed on
some [inaudible] back in a while.
>> Mark Slobin: Well, there still
are some clubs, but you know,
I mean, the whole thing was gutted.
I mean, Hastings Street was the --
was literally paved over to
create the Chrysler Freeway.
So they destroyed the entire
culture of this population
and their music community.
They literally just did that.
So you know, that offers
you fewer choices, right?
>> Male audience member:
No question.
>> Mark Slobin: Yeah?
>> Female audience member: As
a native Kentuckian I was kind
of taken aback when you said
"there was actually a
French horn player from" --
>> Mark Slobin: No, because of the
-- right, because of the stereotypes
>> Female audience member: --
that Kentucky is all hillbillies.
You may as well say Michigan
is all industrial ghetto.
>> Mark Slobin: Yeah, no.
That's why I used the
example, because it goes
against these stereotypes
that people have
about who these people were and what
they might have been listening to.
No, I mean, that's exactly
why I brought that example.
>> Male audience member: Can
you tell us a little bit more
about the ethnic music
like the polka?
>> Mark Slobin: Yeah, the -- oh,
it's fascinating, this whole world.
There are different
stories to tell, you know,
depending on which group it is
and how musically active they were
for their size and scale I mean,
I've been trying to figure that out.
So I have some stories of
some of the communities.
And I know -- and some of
them interact with each other.
Others really kept to themselves.
The Poles were so massive,
this 350,000 people population
in this city, that
they didn't need --
you know, they were really
self-sufficient in a way.
So it's -- a lot of people
played with Poles, and --
but they didn't have to
kind of go out that much
in certain kinds of ways.
But they benefitted from the
school systems, yeah, and the --
some of them went off
on this jazz track.
Where smaller groups, the
Serbs, and the Croats,
and the Romanians would play
together and share repertoires,
but then you know, later when
you've got the Yugoslavia war,
this -- that stopped.
You know, so these diasporic
lives connect to homelands
and what's going on in other
places in certain ways.
There were Gypsy, Roma
musicians who moved
around from one thing to another.
It's complicated, and it's
just really badly researched.
There's just very little that
I've been able to, you know,
bring into this to really do
a thorough job, which would --
nobody kept records of these people.
So you can talk to some of them,
and there's some things to read.
But -- I mean, some
interviews and things like that.
But there's not anywhere
the kind of data you'd want
to have a really serious mapping
of what all those people were
up to, those communities.
>> Male audience member: One
quick follow-up, 30 seconds.
If you're here in D.C. for a
little bit, even this afternoon,
if I were to suggest
one resource outside --
[inaudible] recalling this,
but the very excellent used book
store a few block away with a lot
of great used books on things
that are very [inaudible]
and for example, art.
But quick example, in the
basement of that bookstore,
Capital [inaudible]
Used Bookstore --
there's a wonderful section
on journalism, for example,
memoires of journalists all around,
and there's also music
sections, too.
But you'll see books all over
[inaudible] you got to visit a place
to [inaudible] matter of fact,
[inaudible] across the way it can
be useful to increase your research.
>> Mark Slobin: Thanks, sir.
Sure, it's always good
to find books.
>> Male audience member:
[Inaudible] Used Book Store
in the city, might be.
>> Nancy Groce: Speaking of books.
>> Mark Slobin: Yeah?
>> Nancy Groce: I know
you brought some books.
>> Mark Slobin: Well, you asked
me to come up with a book.
I thought the smallest,
cheapest one, that's --
that goes with the Folklife
Center would be the one to --
>> Nancy Groce: Okay, does it --
>> Mark Slobin: -- the one to bring.
>> Nancy Groce: That's
your "Introduction
to Folk Music," which
is a great book.
I wanted to thank Mark Slobin
for coming today and
giving a great talk.
And please join me in thanking him.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.