Edythe Fern Melrose--The Lady of Charm

The Lady of Charm

Edythe Fern (Culp) Melrose was born in rural Illinois in 1897, but she was raised on a farm in West Mansfield, Ohio. She grew up a farmer's daughter doing chores like milking cows and gathering eggs. "My parents had four daughters and we all did boy's work and household chores." Edythe went to a little country school until her father moved the family to Chicago, so his daughters could get a better education.

At first, Edythe was insecure about being a "country hick" or a "hayseed" at the Bush Conservatory of Music and Performing Arts. To avoid being labeled a "dunce," she became an overachiever and pushed herself to get the highest grades in her class. She learned about charm, personality, diction, poise, and proper speech habits--the standard expectations for young, educated women of that era. Unbeknowst to Edythe, these traits became the focus of her future career.

She graduated with honors from the Bush Conservatory and entered Columbia College in Chicago--a private, nonprofit college specializing in visual and performing arts, liberal arts, and business degrees. There, she graduated from the "School of Media Arts" where she learned about radio broadcasting and business management.

In 1929, Edythe became one of the first women in America to manage a radio station--WJAY in Cleveland. From 1933 until 1941, she emceed her own women's program which was popular locally. Edythe moved her program in 1941 to WXYZ-Radio in Detroit and renamed it "The Lady of Charm." By 1943, she created House of Charm Radio Productions and syndicated her program throughout Michigan, building her Lady of Charm brand. She had a pleasant radio voice, an infectious chuckle, and a wealth of common sense for women that she would sprinkle throughout her program. Her tag line was "A women's charm depends on the way she looks and the way she cooks."

Early television pioneers

Edythe's public image was motherhood and apple pie, but behind the scenes, she was a consummate business woman active in Detroit's professional business organizations. As the Lady of Charm, Edythe Fern Melrose was a much sought-after speaker in the Detroit area. Seven years later, she made the leap to television and became a television pioneer. Her program on WXYZ-TV Channel 7 ran from 1948 until 1960. She was always fashionably dressed and looked like she just left the beauty parlor.

Edythe was one of the first television personalities to utilize product placement, and she doubled-down by shrewdly mentioning the brand names of the appliances used on her studio set which endeared her to sponsors like Frigidaire, Hotpoint, and General Electric. 

Her recommendations were much sought-after by advertisers. She had a fully-functional replica of her home kitchen constructed in the studio at the Maccabees Building and later at WXYZ's Broadcast House in Southfield. Every year, kitchen appliance styles would change, and the Lady of Charm got whatever she asked for free of charge. Her studio kitchen always had the latest appliances and was an advertisement in itself. 

 

When Edythe did a cooking segment, everything was premeasured for her to save precious air-time. Every dish was prepared in two stages: one with ingredients for preparation on-air to be shoved in the oven and another already baked to take out of the oven. She would choose an invited guest or someone from the station to sit down at the end of her show and share the dish while seated at a tablecloth-covered, fully decked-out table with silverware and crystal service. After taping her show, Edythe's assistant finished cooking or baking the extra dish for Edyth's camera crew. Soupy Sales remembered, "We were the best-fed station in town."

WXYZ did not renew Edythe's contract in 1960 after twelve years on Detroit television. She revived her production company producing commercials and syndicated segments titled "The Charm Kitchen" and "House of Fashion" for other Detroit stations including CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. In addition to producing and appearing in ads, she wrote advertising copy for her high-dollar, corporate clientele. To produce her segments, she rented studio time and production facilities from WXYZ Broadcast House in Southfield.

During a studio taping for the Pontiac Motor Car Company on February 27, 1968, one of the station's directors asked Edythe to go backstage and attach a microphone to her bra. It was dark behind the curtain where she tripped over a cable and severely twisted her leg dislocating her knee. She was rushed to the hospital for surgery where her knee cap was removed confining her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

She and her husband (Forest U. Webster) filed a lawsuit charging WXYZ with neglect for not providing a proper passageway backstage for her. The station dragged the lawsuit through two appeals taking eight years to work through the Macomb County Court and the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Just fifteen days after she and her husband were awarded a settlement of $952,000 for damages including back interest, Edythe Fern (Melrose) Webster died at the age of seventy-seven at her home on May 19, 1976. Services were held in Grosse Point Woods at A.H. Peters Funeral Home, and she was buried in Grayling, Michigan.

Edythe was a product of her times as much as a trendsetter for women of her day. Her friends and colleagues remembered Edythe as active in public affairs and concerned about her television viewers. Longtime friend Diane Edgecomb told The Detroit Free Press that "Edythe was a classic, a real television pioneer. She was a genteel women's libber all her life." Business associate and friend Marion Ryan said, "Edythe had a very charming personality and a nice way of putting people at ease. She will be missed." 

Lady of Charm Brings Home the Bacon 

Billy Martin Fight Night in Detroit

Many Detroiters remember Billy Martin when he managed the Detroit Tigers from 1971-1973. He took an aging team of veterans and guided them to their first American League Eastern Division Championship in 1972. Better known to some fans may be the fistfight Billy Martin had with his star pitcher Dave Boswell at the Lindell AC sports bar when Martin managed the Minnesota Twins. Who better to tell that story than Mel Butsicaris, who was tending bar that night.

"I called him Uncle Billy. Billy Martin and my Uncle Jimmy (Butsicaris) were close friends. Martin was best man at my uncle's wedding. He was Uncle Billy to me.

Anyway, Billy Martin was managing the Minnesota Twins in 1969 when he told his players to take a lap around the field before heading to the locker room--a common routine for any sports team. His star pitcher Dave Boswell refused and Uncle Billy said you will if you want to play on my team. Boswell refused a second time and was benched. When the Twins came to Detroit to play the Tigers, Boswell was supposed to start the first game, but Martin benched him.

After the game, the whole team came to the Lindell AC sports bar as usual. Normally, coaches don't go to the same watering hole as their players, but Uncle Jimmy and Billy were close friends. They were sitting at the end of the bar quietly talking. The team was sitting at tables in a large group. Dave Boswell had a few drinks and started bad-mouthing Martin. The more he drank, the louder and more vulgar he got. He started yelling at Martin about his heritage and his mother's character if you know what I mean.

Billy Martin hard at work in a Yankee uniform.

Uncle Billy ignored him. Boswell got so obnoxious his roommate on the road Bobby Allison, a big, strong, power-hitting center fielder, was trying to get Boswell to leave the bar and sleep it off. Boswell got louder and more abusive. Allison kept blocking him until Boswell sucker punched Allison in the face. Bobby went down bleeding. Like a bench-emptying baseball brawl, the team jumped up to get between Boswell and Martin while getting Allison off the floor.

Up until then, Martin kept out of the situation. He told Boswell, 'I don't care what you say about me, but now you're beating up the team. Enough, everyone back to the hotel, curfew in ten minutes and bed check in fifteen.' The hotel was near the sports bar. The players started to march out forcing Boswell out with them. He breaks away from the pack and throws a wild punch at Martin, who ducks. Boswell takes another swing at Martin which he blocks.

Telling Boswell, 'You're all out of warnings,' Martin took him to school. Despite being six inches shorter and weighing many pounds less than his ace pitcher, Martin grew up a tough kid in Berkley, California and pound-for-pound the best boxer I have ever seen in or out of the ring. His fists were moving so fast it looked like a Popeye cartoon. It lasted for only six seconds but Martin landed about twenty punches to Boswell's stomach and face. Power-hitter Bobby Allison picked Boswell off the barroom floor and took him to the hospital.

The sports writers from Minnesota and the Detroit newspapers were there, but they agreed not to write about the story because it would only make the situation worse. It was not good for major league baseball. A couple of days after the brawl, a young reporter who was not a witness to the fight broke the story.

Because of  growing publicity concerns, Dave Boswell called a news conference when he was released from the hospital. Boswell stepped-up and said he was drinking and out-of-line. The fight was his fault. The Twins front office did not care. They fired Martin and the Tigers hired him the following season. To all those people over the years who said they saw Billy Martin challenge Dave Boswell to go outside and fight--you are busted."

Billy Martin died on Christmas Day, 1989, at the age of sixty-one in Johnson City, New York. His pickup truck was driven by longtime Detroit friend William Reedy (53). The truck skidded off a patch of icy pavement and plummeted 300 feet down an embankment. Neither Martin nor Reedy were wearing seat belts. Billy Martin was pronounceed dead of severe head and internal injuries. Reedy survived with a broken hip and ribs.

Billy Martin was born Alfred Manuel Martin. His Italian grandmother called him "Belli" [pretty] as a child and the nickname "Billy" stuck. As a major league baseball manager, Billy Martin built a reputation as one of the game's all-time best. He was known to work wonders with difficult ball clubs and not take crap from players, managers, or umpires. He could shape up a team and get the best from his players.

Unfortunately, Billy Martin had a self-destructive side which followed him throughout his career. Notice the baseball card at the top of this post. Martin is giving the finger to the photographer. By his own admission, "I'm a very bad loser."

Early Detroit Tiger History

Charlie Bennett

 

Prior to 1894, the Detroit Tigers played minor league baseball and were one of the founding members of the West League that played throughout the Great Lakes states. Owner George Vandereck choose the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Boulevards as their home field. Previously, the vacant lot was used as a local hay market for farmers and livestock owners. Vandereck bought the lot and built Bennett Park--named after a popular Tiger catcher Charlie Bennett--who lost his legs in a railway accident in 1894 while running on a rain-slick train platform and falling onto the tracks. Bennett's left foot and his right leg above the knee were severed as the train pulled out, ending his baseball career.

Frank "Old Stone Face" Navin

In 1901, the Tigers joined the new American League as one of its eight founding members. Samuel F. Angus bought the Tigers in 1902 and hired lawyer and baseball enthusiast Frank Joseph Navin to run the club for him. As a young man, Navin was a blackjack and poker dealer in an illegal gambling establishment. He loved horse racing and was an avid wagerer at two racetracks in Windsor, Ontario and attended the Kentucky Derby annually. In 1908, Navin parlayed $5,000 of winnings into buying a significant portion of Tiger stock.

In 1908, Navin bought another large block of shares making him controlling owner and new president of the organization. When Navin's silent business partner William Yawkey--lumber fortune heir--died in 1919, Navin bought his stock becoming full owner of the club. Because he was suddenly cash-poor, he sold 25% of the franchise to auto-body manufacturer Walter Briggs Sr. and 25% to wheel maker John Kelsey of Kelsey-Hayes Corporation. When Kelsey died, Briggs bought his interest in the team becoming an equal co-owner with Navin, but Briggs was content to allow Navin to run the team unhampered.

Frank Navin and Ty Cobb

In 1905, Navin signed legendary Tiger center fielder Ty Cobb for $1,500. The talented ballplayer led the Tigers to their first American League pennant win in 1907. Between seasons, Cobb held out for a $5,000 contract. After bitter negotiations, Navin--a tight-fisted owner--met his match. Cobb was wildly popular with the fans and threatened to expose Navin for the conniving cheapskate he was. The penny-pinching owner quickly did the math and caved-in to Cobb's demand. Cobb led the Tigers to two more consecutive American League pennants in 1908 and 1909 turning a nice profit for the team. Navin made Cobb the team's manager as well as being the team's star player.

Navin Field

Bennett Park consisted of a wooden grandstand and bleachers. It was the smallest ballpark in the league seating 14,000. Owners Navin and Briggs tore down the obsolete wooden Bennett Park between the 1911 and 1912 seasons and built a concrete and steel stadium seating 23,000 fans--renaming it Navin Field. In 1924, Navin built a second deck increasing seating to 30,000.

By 1931, the Great Depression cut Tiger attendance by 30%. To draw fans to the ballpark, Navin tried to sign the most popular player in the game--Babe Ruth--but he wasn't availabe, so Navin bought out Mickey Cochrane's contact from Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack for $100,000 and made him a player-manager. Cochrane was just what the team needed. He helped the Tigers win pennants in 1934 and 1935.

Mickey Cochran with Grace and Frank Navin--1935

 

Under Navin's stewardship, the Tigers won four American League pennants but did not win a World Series until the 1935 season, giving the Tigers their first series win. But Navin's victory lap was short-lived. Navin and his wife Grace rode horses several times a week at the Detroit Riding and Hunt Club. Six weeks after the Tigers won the series, Navin went for a solo ride on his favorite horse Masquerader and suffered a fatal heart attack, falling to the ground. When his horse returned riderless to the stable, his wife cried out for help, but it was too late. Navin was dead at age sixty-five. He was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield, Michigan in a family mausoleum.

Mickey Cochrane and Walter Briggs

 

After Navin's death, Walter O. Briggs purchased Navin's stock and became sole owner. Because Briggs made a fortune manufacturing automobile bodies for Ford, Chrysler, Packard, Hudson, and Willys-Overland, he did not need an income from the team and promised not to take a salary during his tenure as owner. In 1938, he changed the name of Navin Field to Briggs Stadium and remained the sole owner of the Tigers until his death in 1952. The stadium was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961 until the franchise moved to Comerica Park in 2000.

For 104 seasons, the Tigers played baseball at Michigan and Trumbull earning them the distinction of being the oldest continuous one-name-only city franchise in major league baseball.

1935--Detroit Tigers, Lions, and Red Wings win their championships. 

The Great Migration North to Detroit

In what was the largest internal migration of any group in American history, the Great Migration saw six million African Americans migrating from the South to the North drawn by improved economic opportunities and hopes of a better life. Black Americans were also escaping segregation and discriminatory "Jim Crow" laws in the South.

Another factor for the diaspora was the release of the movie Birth of a Nation in 1915 which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a heroic force protecting the purity of white womanhood against sexually aggressive freed slaves after the Civil War. The D.W. Griffith film opened to nationwide protests and demonstrations.

"Birth of a Nation" still. The Black man was played by a white actor in blackface.

 

After a private screening, President Woodrow Wilson released a public statement calling the film "Unfortunate." With the film's general release, the South experienced a resurgence of KKK domestic terrorism driving more black Americans North. Most of the migrants were unskilled laborers and service industry workers--not rural farm workers.

From 1910 through 1929, Detroit experienced the fastest growing African American population in the United States--a 611% increase. During the same period, New York City had a 66% increase and Chicago had a 148% increase. Blacks settled primarily on Detroit's lower east side in minority isolated neighborhood called Black Bottom--originally named by the French for the dark, fertile soil found there. The area adjacent to Black Bottom became Paradise Valley--famous for its jazz clubs.

Black migrants found fierce competition for living space in Detroit's worst neighborhoods which became segregated slums. Living conditions in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom were bleak with the oldest wooden dwellings in the city--many dating back to the 1860s. Fire was a constant hazard. The buildings were owned by white absentee landlords and were poorly maintained. Old hotels and row houses were subdivided into small apartments and boarding houses to increase profits--many without plumbing facilities.

Thinking they had left "Jim Crow" laws enshrining segregation and racism behind, blacks found that in Detroit they were confined to "red lined" neighborhoods backed by real estate covenants preventing them from moving into Detroit's established white neighborhoods or suburbs. Blacks found that racial discrimination and white supremacy were entrenched in the North just as they were in the South.

But there was a significant distinction between the North and the South for blacks in this era. In the South, white people didn't mind living in proximity with blacks. The plantation culture depended upon it. But white people didn't want to work next to blacks. The North was the opposite. White people tolerated working with blacks, but they didn't want black people in their neighborhoods.

The assembly line

Early on, black women overwhelmingly worked in domestic service jobs. Eventually, clerk positions opened up in the retail industry for them. Black men worked in the service industry at hotels, restaurants, passenger trains, and public works. The jobs paid little, offered no fringe benefits, and provided no chance for advancement. Labor shortages during World War One opened up good jobs in shipyards, foundries, steel mills, auto factories, and meat packing. Unskilled black laborers took the most undesirable and dangerous jobs wherever they were employed.

Henry Ford

When Henry Ford announced the Five-Dollar Day in 1914, he also ramped up the hiring of blacks to fill vacancies in the Highland Park Plant. Employee turnover was a problem, and black workers were willing do jobs others would not. This set many black workers on the road to modernity. Beginning in the 1920s, Dodge and Packard began recruiting black workers too.

With improved economic conditions, a black inner city culture developed catering to the needs of African Americans. Churches, markets, bakeries, barber shops, hotels, beauty parlors, clinics, jazz clubs, and adult entertainment developed. But every white and black Detroiter knew where the color lines were and woe to him that crossed them.

The high cost for African Americans penetrating the color line in Detroit is exemplified by the Dr. Ossian Sweet affair in 1925. As a youth in Bartow, Florida, Ossian witnessed the lynching of a black man in 1911. The angry white mob strung up the man while he pleaded for his life. The vigilantes doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. The crowd cheered when the flames enveloped him. Traumatized, the Sweet family moved to Detroit as part of the Great Migration. 

Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys

 

Ossian Sweet managed to secure an education and attend medical school at Wilberforce Academy in Ohio. Between semesters he worked in Detroit as a bellhop at several hotels--one summer he was a vendor at Bob-Lo Island Amusement Park. Dr. Sweet and his family were part of a new demographic--upwardly mobile, black Americans. As a young doctor at Dunbar Memorial Hospital, Sweet wanted to escape the confines and squalor of Detroit's minority-isolated inner city. Dr. Sweet bought a home on Detroit's east side in an all-white, working-class neighborhood.

When word spread of the purchase, whites viewed the incursion into their neighborhood as a violation of their "sacred" real estate covenant. The day the Sweet's moved in, a mob of "neighbors" assembled outside their home on September 8th, 1925 and cursed them with racial slurs. On the second day, the crowd grew to several hundred angry whites. Dr. Sweet and his family were joined by Sweet's two brothers and seven other friends--no doubt for a house warming get-together and a show of moral support. The hostile mob surrounded the house and started throwing rocks and bricks through the windows.

The sound of shattering glass terrorized the group and prompted Ossian's brother Henry to fire two shots at the mob--the first above their heads and the second into the crowd. Leon Breiner took a bullet and died. The Detroit police were conspicuous by their absence until the call went out that a white man had been shot by a black man. Everyone in the Sweet home was arrested, taken to jail, and tried for conspiracy to murder.

Clarence Darrow

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) retained the best lawyer in the land--Chicago civil liberties attorney Clarence Darrow. The first trial lasted four weeks and ended in a mistrial. The second trial focused only on Henry Sweet--the shooter. The prosecution pushed for a murder charge, but the defense insisted that a man's home was his castle, and he had every right to defend it. Henry Sweet was acquitted.

The Sweet trials were a referendum on race relations and segregation in Detroit ushering in a new era of political activism. But the graphic incident showed the risk of violating the city's red-lined neighborhoods. When it became clear to whites that black people were breaching their segregated neighborhoods, growing numbers of white Detroiters began to relocate to the expanding suburbs north, south, and west of the city in a demographic shift known as white flight.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Great Migration slowed during the Depression but picked up again with the coming of World War Two. The Selective Service took many white and black males out of the work force to serve in the military. The war represented a turning point in black employment prospects. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order #8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) mandating nondiscrimination in defense industries and government jobs. Industrial work began to eclipse service employment for black men. By the end of the war, African Americans held 8% of defense jobs, up from 3% before the war. Despite the gains for black men, black women were still relegated to domestic work and low wages.

The United States Congress debated making the FEPC permanent, but Southern legislators cut off funding and shut down the program in 1946. It took another twenty years before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established to address many of the same issues.

World War II helped transform Detroit's social geography. Several distinct black communities emerged based on income, occupation, and status within black Detroit. Many African Americans fortunate enough to flee the crowded city center left as soon as they could; the rest were left behind to bear the brunt of being trapped in the city's worst housing. Detroit's shifting racial borderlands became battlegrounds for the future of the city. This racial frontier put blacks on a collision course with their white counterparts.

"Detroit Lost Neighborhoods: Black Bottom and Paradise Valley"
https://fornology.blogspot.com/2016/01/detroits-lost-neighborhoods-black.html

Before Berry Gordy There Was Joe Von Battle Producing Records in Detroit

Joe Von Battle in his Hastings Street record shop

Joe Von Battle was born in 1915 in Macon, Georgia and moved during the Great Migration with his family to Detroit, Michigan. In his teens, he worked doing odd jobs in Detroit’s famous Eastern Market until he found work with Detroit Edison digging trenches and burying electrical lines. During much of World War II, Joe worked double shifts. One shift at the Hudson Motor Car Company and the other shift at the Chrysler Plant across the street. When the war ended, Joe was permanently laid off like many African American workers, displaced by White veterans returning from the war.

Joe Battle vowed to be his own boss and never work for anyone again. He added Von for a middle name as a young man, emulating European film actor Erich Von Stroheim, who he admired. When Battle opened his record business, he realized the middle name Von was helpful on his business cards, obscuring his African American ancestry. In 1945, a narrow grocery storefront was vacated at 3530 Hastings Street in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood on the lower Eastside, Joe Von Battle stepped in and opened Joe’s Record shop.

Joe outside his store

In 1948, Joe Von Battle purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder and made a makeshift recording studio in the back of his shop. There he recorded artists like John Lee Hooker; Washboard Willie; pianist Detroit Count, who recorded “Hastings Street Opera;” Tamp Red who recorded “Detroit Blues;” Louisiana Red, Memphis Slim, Kenny Burrell, and many other country blues musicians.

Joe Von Battle recorded the final songs and sounds of the people who migrated north for a better life. His shop specialized in records that appealed to African Americans from the rural South who left to work in the automobile or steel industries for a better life. Country blues traveled with them. Joe is believed by music historians to be the first African American record producer in the post war period recording on the JVB, Von, and Battle Records labels.

His record shop played host to Detroit’s itinerate blues musicians. Typically, the music was performed live by a singer with his guitar and maybe a washboard and a harmonica player for accompaniment. Country blues was raw and rooted in the struggle for survival in a world of inherited misery. It sung about poverty, loss, suffering, desertion, death, booze, and loneliness. Country blues had its feet firmly grounded to the earth and rural life.

 

 

Joe recorded another style of music with a hopeful spiritual message born out of the same misery—gospel music. Joe was most proud of almost one-hundred sermons he recorded of legendary pastor C.L. (Clarence La Vaughn) Franklin at the original New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street down from his record shop. On Sundays, Joe would broadcast Reverend Franklin’s sermons on speakers set up outside the shop. His storefront always attracted a crowd.

Probably the most precious recordings he ever recorded were eight hymns sung by Reverend Franklin’s fourteen-year-old daughter Aretha before she signed with Columbia Records in 1960 secularizing her music. When Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic Records in 1966, she was paired with producer Jerry Wexler who helped her become the Queen of Soul.

Aretha Franklin performing

In 1956, the Federal government announced the construction of the National Interstate Highway System spelling doom for Hastings Street, the heart of Detroit’s African American business community and further down Hasting’s Street Paradise Valley, Detroit’s legendary blues and jazz entertainment district. The construction of I-375 was a useless 1.062-mile spur that ran parallel to I-75. When the Black business community was uprooted, the financial health of many successful African American entrepreneurs was cut short.

The transition prompted a Black diaspora to the 12^th Street area on Detroit’s Westside, creating overcrowding and increased racial tension in the city. The Black community was boxed in by real estate covenants and red lining, restricting their free movement around the city and the greater Detroit area. There was a distinct colorline that Blacks begrudgingly conformed to. Within its confines, the African American community struggled to make the best of a bad situation.

Joe Von Battle moved his record shop to 12^th Street in 1960, but by that time there was a new sound dominating the radio and television airways of Detroit threatening his business. “There is a different generation now,” Joe told the Detroit Free Press. “All they want to buy is that Motown stuff with that beat they want to dance to. Today, young disc jockeys won’t play the blues. They say it’s degrading,”

Berry Gordy brought a polished professionalism and aggressive promotion to his Gordy/Tamla/Motown record labels. The new urban sound was sleek, suave, and sophisticated appealing to a broader, younger, crossover audience. The content of the music changed from the tough realism of country blues to lyrical, hard-driving rhythms and strong choral arrangements with a pop music flare which listeners could dance to.

The modern male and female groups wore fancy, matching outfits and danced synchronized choreography to the music. The Motown sound was tailormade for television and radio, taking the new music from Detroit’s Westside to the rest of the country and the globe.

Not only did the music change, the record industry changed also. In the 1960s when the chain department stores established record departments, they began selling rhythm and blues singles and albums. Rhythm and blues had entered the mainstream. Independent, specialty record shops could not compete. Black record stores struggled to survive.

Then on July 23, 1967, to add insult to injury, 12^th Street erupted with racial strife and conflagration. The first night Joe protected his store with a shotgun but the second day he was ordered by police to evacuate the premises and allow the authorities to restore order which took a week.

In the meantime, Joe’s business was looted, torched, and hosed down by the fire department. When Joe and his family were allowed to return to the record shop, the smell of charred wood and melted vinyl hung heavy in the air. Twenty years of tape-recorded blues history, Joe’s life work, went up in smoke or was washed into the street.

Looters oustside of Joe's shop in July 1967

           

Joe’s daughter Marsha laments that “Some of the most significant voices in recorded history were on those melted records and fire-soaked reel-to-reel tapes. Thousands of songs, sounds, and voices of the era, most never pressed into vinyl, were gone forever. I believe Daddy died that day. My father’s alcoholism gravely worsened after his life’s work and provision for his family was destroyed by looters and rioters.” Joe suffered for years with Addison’s disease and died a broken man in 1973 at the young age of fifty-seven.

Marsha Battle Philpot, aka Marsha Music, wrote a biography about her father to document his music legacy. Marsha brought Joe Von Battle's story back to life in 2008 in her Marsha Music: The Detroitist blog. She writes about Detroit's African American history and culture on her blog.

Marsha Battle Philpot also has published a beautifully written book of poetry and prose titled The Detroitist: An Anthology About Detroit dealing with the era of Detroit's White flight in the 1950s and 1960s and its impact on those left behind.

Marsha Music's Blog