Motown memories tell a tale of empowerment and Detroit pride
Posted by DominiqueKing | Filed under Detroit MI, music
Well-heeled Motown fans are preparing to celebrate the legendary label’s 50th anniversary with a swanky “Golden Gala” on November 21 that carries a price tag of $350 to $1,000 per ticket, but I’d suggest popping for the $10 admission to Detroit’s Motown Museum as a more economical and authentic way to celebrate the music that made and influenced several generations of talent.
Many metro Detroiters haven’t visited the museum in a modest blue-and-white house on West Grand Boulevard (a.k.a. Berry Gordy Jr. Blvd.), but the museum is a true Detroit gem that draws visitors making musical pilgrimages from all over the world to see the famed Hitsville U.S.A. and the legendary Studio A, where many of Motown’s most memorable hits were recorded.
Visiting the museum on a cold autumn weekday, we still saw a steady stream of visitors that included folks from Pennsylvania, Canada and France who were on the group tour with us, as well as two busloads of students from a metro Detroit school district that pulled up to the museum just as we were leaving.
More after the break…
The museum is small, but the folks at the Motown Museum suggest visitors go through with one of their tour guides. It would probably take a casual visitor no time to run through the museum and check out the album covers, photos, vintage 1960s furnishings and the tiny recording studio, but going through with a good guide gives you a much better sense of the history behind the things and Motown’s unique place in music, culture and even the politics of those heady years.
Our guide for the day was a film student from Wayne State University who never seemed to tire of sharing the anecdotes about the artists and did a great job of giving visitors a real sense of the struggle experienced by the label and its stars in a time often pock-marked with ugly racism and segregation.
My favorite part of the tour came when we all trooped into Studio A. The room seemed shockingly small to have unleashed such a large contribution to Detroit’s sonic landscape.
Motown, alas, outgrew its humble Detroit origins and moved to California in 1972, where they could expand into television, movies and other media.
Many fans felt Motown lost their soul after the move, but the memories and claim Detroit held as Motown’s true home remained in many hearts and minds. By 1980, the Hitsville U.S.A. house became a shrine of sorts to Motown’s legacy with the opening of the museum.
Motown’s official 50th anniversary occurred on January 12, 2009, with celebrations scheduled throughout this year.
There was one somber note at the museum earlier this year after the unexpected death of Michael Jackson this past summer. The museum served as the site for several days’ worth of impromptu gatherings of fans that mourned the singer’s death and celebrated his life, with images of the scene on the museum’s front lawn broadcast throughout the world via conventional and new media.
Jackson fans left hundreds of sequined gloves, stuffed animals, photos and other memorabilia outside of the museum to create a temporary memorial. When it was all over, museum officials gathered up the gifts and sent them for burial in a grave marked by a headstone in a nearby cemetery (this seemed like such a strange story that I wrote about it on my own Midwest Guest site–it’s one of my most read posts and draws visits from all over the world!).
Time moves on, and many of the Motown artists like Jackson, and some of the legendary Funk Brothers who powered the Motown sound through many hits, have already left us, but the music still remains as a story of empowerment and pride that is worth listening to again and again…now more than ever.
Related posts:
- Visiting the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn
- Stuff to Do: Assembly Line Concert
- Stuff to Do: Tour the Ren Cen
- Jazz Musicians From Detroit
- Concert of Colors: Celebrating diversity in Detroit
Tags: Berry Gordy Jr., Detroit, Funk Brothers, Hitsville U.S.A., Michael Jackson, michigan, motown, Motown Museum
