Do not be fooled by the title of this book or its cover art. The most recent volume by prolific and stalwart ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin makes no effort to survey the music of Detroit, Michigan, one of the largest and most bustling urban centers in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. It is not about rhythm and blues, and it is not a survey that seeks to present a balanced history of music in the city over time. The narrative is instead deeply personal, drawn from the author's own experience growing up in Detroit. I suppose that I was asked to review Slobin's book because of my professional proximity to the music of Motown, perhaps Detroit's greatest musical export. But throughout the process of reading and seeking to understand this work, I found myself drawing much more on a personal connection to the city.

Slobin's topics range from things like neighborhood character to immigration, religious life, and cultural organizations in the city. His study helps to reinforce what many have long known but so rarely expressed in written form: Detroit has a fascinating, multi-layered historical relationship with music that is deeply ingrained in both its past and present residents. Music has always been central to life in the city, and Motor City Music provides a series of micro-studies to show how and why this is the case in a variety of settings. The book is at once extremely narrow and impossibly broad. It is about a single person's journey but also the manner in which it might overlap with the history of millions of others.

There is no underlying critical argument in the book. Instead, each section is rooted in a connection with the author—something he experienced or that was formative to his own musical and cultural journey. Slobin uses his memories and life as a starting point and then ventures into sources that range from interviews to archival sources and a wide range of secondary writings. He often finds that there is little previous work to support his claims, which is understandable with such a vast perspective on the city and its people.

Slobin slices information in a highly idiosyncratic manner. To list the topics of the book in order would not make much sense without the context of the author's perspective. The years Slobin discusses most fully—the 1920s to the 1950s—were the boom years of Detroit as the automobile capital of the world. The place of car manufacturing thus looms throughout many of the book's pages and even provides the conceptual frame for the book, as Slobin applies the metaphor of motorized transportation to his analysis. The chapters are titled accordingly: “A City in Motion,” “The Traffic Circle,” “The City in the Rearview Mirror,” etc. I am not particularly taken by this organization, finding the actual topics themselves more descriptive and compelling. They are full of important histories, though, that delve into topics often mentioned casually in writings or discussions about Detroit but rarely so thoughtfully researched. His memories lead to probing work on music in the public schools, immigration and migration, the isolation and sometimes interesting interactions between ethnic groups (Jewish, Armenian, Polish, African American, and so on), urban design, the role of local media, in addition to many other topics.

If the frame is at all clunky, the details are far from it. The memoir aspect of the book is documented through the analysis of (often fascinatingly esoteric) archival recordings, popular and not-so-popular vernacular songs, Detroit's classical tradition, biographies of local actors, and histories of institutions. I found some of the most interesting discussions to be about local records like Ted Gomulka's “A City Called Hamtramck” (79–82) and the Detroit Count's “Hastings Street Opera” (95–97), which helped to define Detroit's neighborhoods by the people who lived and worked in them just after World War II. In one particularly arresting section, Slobin investigates the content of his Aunt Ann's camp songs from a Jewish summer camp in the late 1930s. I was struck when learning that a song that I had learned at a Christian camp in southern Ohio during the 1970s as “Old McPhadden” was also sung in a Jewish version called “Yacob and Hans,” which Slobin describes as a “hoary vaudeville German schtick about twins” (21).

There are few people who could write a book like this. Slobin has both memories of his time in Detroit and the scholarly perspective to step back and understand his role in the city's musical life. Music is the nominally binding element, but the real thread holding the book together is Slobin's own Jewish perspective. There are surely more people who understand Detroit's African American histories than its Jewish ones. As Slobin shows, the role of Jewish people—as musicians, teachers, journalists, mentors—is central to the story of music in the city. To get this history from a critically-minded insider perspective is invaluable. Slobin tells us about his teachers, schools, private lessons, and ensembles—many of which were rooted in Detroit's Jewish community, and all of which he frames through a Jewish perspective. He shows how his family's preference for classical forms, which so thoroughly filtered his early musical experiences, were firmly rooted in a more general “use” of classical music as a marker of Germanic tradition (mostly concert and listening experiences). Examples like this pervade the book.

If the book's glimpses of the city are any indication, Slobin's relationship to Detroit was like those of millions of others. He was born there and reveled in its quickly changing musical landscape during the 1950s and 1960s before leaving, only to return decades later to find an even more complicated urban texture obsessed with renewal. Elsewhere Detroit has taken on a near mythic quality, exemplified by things like Shinola murals in Soho evoking the city's mechanistic profile (208). Thus, the metaphor of Detroit's inseparable relationship with the post–World War II automobile industry is, in fact, infused throughout the contents of the book in a deeper way than even Slobin might realize. We do not see the city from the 1980s to the present day, with its influx of Russian Jews, rise of techno, shrinking population and political scandals, and constant “revitalization.” Instead, Slobin's story is about a different time that, in part, explains why we cared about Detroit in the first place.