A Fashionable Tour through the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi: The 1852 Journal of Juliette Starr Dana by David T. Dana III, Juliette Starr Dana
2006; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mhr.2006.0014
ISSN2327-9672
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
Resumo126 Michigan Historical Review and Revolution is an overdue history of that scene. A journalist and one time Michigan disc jockey, Carson brings a wealth of knowledge and detail to his account of Michigan rock. Although he spends some time on the city's deep history of blues and rhythm and blues?including Motown?and takes his history back to the 1950s, the vast bulk of Grit, Noise, and Revolution is devoted to the proliferation inDetroit after 1964 of bands, clubs, and ballrooms devoted to a young white audience. Carson discusses many of the best-known bands and performers associated with Detroit, including Mitch Ryder, Bob Seger, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Ted Nugent, and especially theMC5, whose saga is inmany ways the focus of the book. The real strong point of Grit, Noise, and Revolution, though, is the coverage of many lesser-known figures, including musicians such as Gary Quackenbush, guitarist for local luminaries the Scot Richard Case (later SRC); club owners such as Dave Leone, founder of the Grosse Point Hideout, and Russ Gibb, who created the pivotal Grande Ballroom; as well as a host of record-label entrepreneurs, including Ed Wingate of Golden World Records, and Pun Plamondon, the force behind the independent A-Square record label. Profiling local institutions with as much attention as he does the bands that made the music, Carson provides a multidimensional portrait of a thriving music scene and also carefully describes the conditions that led to its demise. If the book has a shortcoming, it is that Carson has no strong interpretive angle on the material he covers so thoroughly. He does not gloss over complex issues such as theway that race and class structured Detroit rock, or themanner inwhich politics informed the scene through themusic of the MC5 and theirmentor/manager, John Sinclair; but neither does he address these issues with great insight. Nonetheless, for those who want a record of what happened, and especially for those who believe thatMotown was the be-all and end-all of Detroit music, Carson recounts a valuable story. Steve Waksman Smith College David T. Dana III, ed. A Fashionable Tour through the Great Fakes and Upper Mississippi: The 1852 Journal ofJuliette Starr Dana. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Pp. 122. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Paper, $24.95. The Great Lakes region in the 1850s was at best newly settled; its northern and western portions were still a veritable wilderness populated by native peoples, government agents, and adventurous speculators. It is Book Reviews 127 remarkable, then, that Juliette Starr Dana made this frontier region her vacation destination, spending nine weeks and $341.62 to trek to spots frequented by tourists (although she found one port town a "very uninteresting and stupid place") and spots so remote thatwhite people were a curiosity (p. 16). Dana's travel notes are valuable because they form a narrative of a woman's life, and her words reveal both her spirit of adventure and her appreciation of this "fashionable tour." But perhaps even more compelling is the story of cultural contact and the often cautious interaction between tribal people and middle-class white tourists steaming through "virgin territory" that a careful reading of her journal reveals. In addition to making observations about both the natural setting and the technological landscape?the emerging transportation infrastructure of railroads, canals, and steamboats?Dana comments on the cultural landscape, albeit in language reflective of her middle-class, white perspective. Traveling with her teenage son and moving from steam train to steamboat and back again, she often found hotel rooms and lodging to be "western" in the most pejorative sense. Dana found even the "best" hotel in one town "amiserable dirty & badly managed affair" filled with roaches and assorted vermin (p. 16). She wrote that she could not "say I think much of western manners," and she noted a "coarseness and want of refinement about all I have seen yet." The westerners, she thought, "appear so neu/' (p. 34). In addition to the clash between eastern sensibilities and western ones, Dana's tour reflected how white people and their culture were encroaching on the lands of the native peoples of the Great Lakes. Dana bought...
Referência(s)