For seventy-two years, Martha Reeves has called Detroit her home. It is where she was raised in a home ebullient with Southern musical influence, paid for by her father’s hard work in the Northern industrial center. It is where she found, according to her autobiography, “a strong sense of neighborhood” and community support for her passion, singing. It is where she worked as a secretary at Motown Records. It is where she and some friends filled in for the house back-up singers one day and she got her big break, becoming one of the most recognizable voices of “The Music of Young America” and an international star. Detroit gave Martha the American dream.
Her biggest hit, “Dancing in the Street,” has been used in documentaries by PBS and the BBC in scenes discussing the 1967 Detroit Riot and has been the subject of books on the racial politics and music of the 1960s. An exhibit in the Detroit Historical Society museum claims “the song became known as an anthem of civil unrest when inner-city riots broke out in Detroit and other American cities.” Indeed, the tune seems irrevocably bound to the upheaval in the popular memory.
The History of the Song
It fits in the story well. “Just by virtue of the words, it was a song that in my mind was about protest,” says Mark Kurlansky, author of the 2013 book, Ready for a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for Changing America. The original idea for the song, written by Motown legend Marvin Gaye and two others, purportedly came from the common summer sight of kids splashing and dancing in the road in water from opened fire hydrants. Gaye approached Reeves who lent her voice to the project, and the song was born.
In Suzanne Smith’s Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, Reeves calls it simply “a party song.” However, Gaye, whom Martha writes she “loved,” may have had another view of the song’s meaning. Much has been made of his statement that Martha and the Vandellas “captured a spirit that felt political,” and his response to news of the 1965 Watts riot with an espoused desire to “throw the radio down and burn all the bullshit songs I’d been singing and get out there and kick some ass with the rest of the brothers.”
Importantly, both comments were made after “Dancing in the Street,” recorded in 1964, had been on the airwaves for some time. The title of the song, which Gaye contributed, has been interpreted as a coded description of rioting, and the list of cities mentioned, also a Gaye addition, did have large black populations. Nevertheless, the argument that the song was intended as a riot song is tenuous at best.
Motown founder, Berry Gordy, was a black Detroit businessman notoriously devoted to the bottom-line. His strategies put the independent black label not only on black radio stations and in black homes, but also in the ears of white Americans. Motown lived up to its assertion that it was “the music of young America.” Gordy viewed keeping the label apolitical as critical to maintaining crossover success. At meetings attended by much of the company meant to decide which songs to release, songs possessing a potentially political vibe were shot down and their release dates pushed back, in some cases for years. According to Antonio Dandridge, Motown’s archivist, two Martha and the Vandellas songs “Jimmy Mack” and “Dancing in the Street” contended for release in 1964. Jimmy Mack, featured foot-stomping, which Dandridge says could have “sounded like they were marching,” and lyrics such as “Jimmy Mack, when are you coming back” making it possible to hear the tune as a comment on the war in Vietnam. Consequently, the label waited for three years to release the song. In contrast, “Dancing in the Street,” considered innocuous and apolitical, was released that year.
Politicization of the song
If the song was not obviously political from the outset, its politicization must have resulted from its environment. Kurlansky argues that leaders and intellectuals in the Black Power movement hijacked the tune, proposing that “people who had had involvement in the civil rights movement saw how music could be used; music was a very important part of that movement and they wanted to continue that but with different music.” Militant leader H. Rap Brown and others reportedly began using the song at rallies to energize the crowd.
While the tune indisputably has acquired a political charge since its conception, its connection with Detroit’s unrest at the time is questionable. “It could be that the song connection was a post facto thing,” says Philip Meyer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Detroit riots for the Detroit Free Press. He could not recall the song’s involvement in the riot, telling the HPR, “I looked up the lyrics and they were not familiar, I listened to the tune and it was not familiar, and I didn’t hear anything about it during the riot or the year after.”
Others present during the riots deny the song’s presence as well. Sylvia Hollifield was sixteen in 1967. Classically trained on harp and piano and a singer herself, she was no stranger to Motown music. Living in a house a little more than a block from the riot’s epicenter, she recalls “tanks going up and down our street […] hearing gunfire [… and] people walking down the street with washing machines.” “It was like a war,” she explained. Asked about the song she says, “I am a music person and I don’t remember any music.” Rochelle Mitchell and Margo Easton sing in a choir with Hollifield. Of a similar age and students of music as well, they too experienced the riot firsthand. Mitchell says that during the violence “we could hear no music; all we heard was gunfire and sirens.” To Easton, “it was a song that celebrated being carefree [that had] nothing to do with the riot.”
Mislabeling the Song
“Dancing in the Street” was not the “anthem” of the Detroit riots, but it continues to bear that label. Kurlansky, in an interview with the HPR, said of the Detroit riot, “people danced to [Dancing in the Street] on the streets and sang it on the streets.” However, when pressed on the question of whether the song was heard during the violence, he admitted, “I haven’t seen anything about it in Detroit and whether that means it didn’t happen I just don’t know.” His disclaimer of ignorance was not included in print, but statements tying the song and the Detroit riot were, writing,
“There were more than 120 violent uprisings in American cities that year, most of them in the summer. Some of the most violent were in Cambridge, Maryland, Minneapolis, New York, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Tampa. But the two worst and most remembered were in Detroit and Newark. Unknown to Reeves, the theme song of these disruptions around the country, or “across the nation,” just like “Burn, baby, Burn” in Watts, was “Dancing in the Street.”
Nonetheless, Kurlansky’s eagerness-turned-inaccuracy is explicable. To him, the Black Power movement was important as a unified effort, and thus generalizing from one riot to all riots was simply an honest mistake. However, to those who lived through the riot and to historians more receptive to nuance, this mistake is deeply problematic. What happened in Detroit, while related to national moods, was a phenomenon with complex causes that cannot simply be chalked up to the power of music, or even the Black Power movement. Of course, Kurlansky is not solely guilty. Every instance of haphazard juxtaposition of “Dancing in the Street” with discussion of the Detroit riot bears some of the responsibility. Understanding the truth about the riot’s cause, and the truth about the rioting itself, is essential to explaining the current state of Southeast Michigan, one tinged with racial undertones and socioeconomic disparity, and in Detroit, where a political, economic, and cultural narrative of returning to greatness has become central to decision-making and self-imagination, a narrative necessarily tied to an understanding of the past. Furthermore, it is crucial to preempting similar occurrences in the future, to assure that when leaders recognize conditions that could lead to widespread social unrest they do not first think of the cooked-up effect of a non-factor, but rather pay head to the true harbingers of conflict, and address them quickly and equitably. Until those looking back refuse to coat the truth with rumor, myth will be perpetuated, and the safety of experience will be lost to the fleeting guilty pleasure of expedience, leaving those looking forward with ignorance recognizable only by witnesses, and then by none.