Deindustrialized Detroit is a far cry from its past. At its height, it boasted a population of 1.85 million with heavy employment at Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, the “Big Three” auto manufacturers. Once an automotive powerhouse, manufacturing jobs in Detroit between 2000 and 2010 alone fell by a staggering 52.5%, with only 20,000 city residents working in the industry.
But one factor has held constant throughout the city’s economic volatility: music.
It was Ford’s plants themselves that fostered the musical passion of Detroit’s residents during prosperity, bringing together a large group — who migrated with their music — into a common space.
“When we relocate, it’s not just our clothes and our furniture, but we take our cultural heritage with us, and part of that is music,” Eldonna May, professor of music at Wayne State University, said.
Detroit’s $5-a-day auto manufacturing plant wage attracted thousands of African Americans through the 1910 Great Migration from the rural south, who brought with them their musical inclinations.
“Their forebears that utilized work songs and field hollers right in the agricultural industry … just re-appropriated that concept into the manufacturing plant,” May said.
These work songs — classic blues music calling to the rhythm of the heartbeat as well as gospel from the Black Church — migrated from the agricultural fields to the assembly lines.
As technology improved, music and auto work became further intertwined. A new era emerged out of Detroit’s industrial smokestacks: rock ‘n’ roll. Cassette tapes made their way to the offices of plant managers in the 1960s, and music blasted on loudspeaker systems as workers down below worked to a faster tempo.
Assembly lines and the indirect gathering of masses of workers to listen to music is one thing, but what really made Detroit unique from other industrial, migratory destinations, like Chicago?
Mark Slobin, ethnomusicologist and professor emeritus at Wesleyan University, suggests two reasons. Public schools invested heavily in music and gave kids instruments, nurturing talent early. This wasn’t unique to Detroit, but it seems to have been especially strong in the city’s education system.
The other reason is the auto industry itself.
“It gave them [musicians] more possibility in Detroit,” Slobin said. “It gave everybody a little more [flexibility]. They worked in the factories and then on weekends they’d go on touring, and get on radio stations.”
With a steady source of income to fall back on and a strong support system of colleagues and family, musicians had the opportunity to take calculated risks.
So Detroit fostered an environment that the agricultural society simply couldn’t offer: On the corporate side, companies like Ford and General Motors formally invested in the musical connections through creative advertisements and films, improving public relations and worker efficiency; and on the front lines, informal meetings between musicians on the assembly line boomed Detroit to musical fame.
Detroit-raised jazz musician Yusef Lateef, for example, discovered Middle Eastern instruments — his hallmark — through a fellow worker on the assembly lines, Slobin said.
Perhaps the most famous outcome of Detroit’s golden era of industry was the record label giant known as Motown, which skyrocketed to become the largest Black-owned business in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
The label originated with Berry Gordy, who worked on the Ford Motor Company’s production line and analyzed the processes inside out. He then took that approach and applied it to the recording industry.
According to May, Gordy implemented not just the skeleton of the manufacturing process, but also the finer details like quality assurance and efficient production.
“The magic word is ‘building.’ It’s part of that creative process,” May said. “And so that’s what he brought to Motown, that experience.”
Gordy’s perspective formed a timeless connection between two seemingly disparate industries: one building cars and the other building music.
The record label — or better characterized, hit factory — launched the careers of countless Detroit locals, from child prodigy Stevie Wonder to Hall of Fame vocal group The Temptations, both rooted in Motown’s unique sound synthesizing pop, R&B and soul. Motown dominated the Billboard charts, with almost 80 songs reaching the Top 10 in the ‘60s alone.
Meanwhile, Detroit’s deindustrialization was ramping up, caused by, among other reasons, suburbanization and international competition. The city saw a 22% decline in jobs from the 1970s to the ‘90s, as well as a population decline of 310,000 in the ‘70s alone.
Despite the downturn of economic production, the production of new and pioneering music maintained full throttle. Just as Detroit’s industrial history led to the boost of genres like Jazz and Blues, the city’s changing demographics and social landscape birthed new genres of its own.
In the ‘70s, the new, raw and aggressive genre of Proto-Punk emerged from Detroit through experimentation with raw sounds by rock bands like The Stooges, inspiring European music and innovation worldwide.
Alongside Detroit’s economic shift, technology also brought changes to music in the city.
As the auto industry’s music culture transitioned from communal listening through cassette tapes to individualized listening through earbuds, music transitioned with it. Once more, Detroit was at the forefront of a new music genre: techno.
The evolving industrial landscape has influenced pioneers like music trio The Belleville Three, to merge diverse genres, technological advances and the mechanical sounds of Detroit’s factories to shape a new futuristic aesthetic, representative of a changing Detroit.
“We’ve got things set up on loops we’re sampling, then we’ve got scratching and all kinds of devices, and the incorporation of white noise, industrial noise, traffic, construction noise, even nature sounds that all managed to find their way into music,” May said.
Today, artists continue to emerge from and lead the Detroit music scene, including garage rock revivalist Jack White and legendary rappers like Eminem and Big Sean. But throughout it all, the common thread has been community.
“There were families and mentors, and it wasn’t just a bunch of stars playing music off the top of their head. And that mentorship of the community is still going on today,” Slobin said.
In a story about cars and Detroit, I can’t believe this article makes no mention of the impact of interstate highway construction on the Detroit metro area. Deindustrialization did cause economic downturn, but white flight and urban sprawl began long before those economic downturns. Detroit was decimated by the interstate and communities were literally segregated by the highway (if they weren’t completely leveled). Additionally, crediting Ford for an expanding Black middle-class is straight up historical revisionism. Not only did labor unions secure middle class wages and benefits, Black middle class neighborhoods thrived in Detroit even before Ford opened his plant. Motown USA could not have existed without its historical antecedent in Black Bottom Detroit, which was completely leveled in the name of urban renewal and interstate construction. Lastly, this article commits journalistic malpractice by ignoring Ford’s well known history of anti-semitism, racism and hatred for jazz music in a story about African American music traditions in Detroit. I wish this story utilized any of the hundreds of sources that exist at the Detroit public library instead of only relying on only one single named source.