Marsha Battle Philpot [aka Marsha Music] is a familiar
Detroit figure and longtime booster of the city who describes herself as
"a writer and griot (storyteller)" of Detroit's post-World War II
history, and its gentrification over fifty years later. Born on June 11, 1954,
Marsha is the oldest child of the late blues record producer Joe Von Battle and
his second wife, the late Westside beauty, Shirley (Baker) Battle.
Joe ran a blues and gospel record shop with a makeshift
recording studio in the back room on Hastings Street, at Mack Avenue, just
north of the Black Bottom area of Detroit. Joe recorded John Lee Hooker, Rev.
C.L. Franklin and his fourteen-year-old daughter Aretha, among many other singers long forgotten.
Joe met
Shirley Baker as she waited on the streetcar outside of the record shop, and he gave
her a job. Soon he was smitten, despite being married with four teenaged
children. After several years of going together, Joe bought Shirley a large
house in Highland Park, a city within Detroit’s city limits, and he divorced
his first wife. After Joe and Shirley had two children, they made it official
and married.
Marsha never knew of her parent’s early unmarried status
until after her mother’s passing at age 79. "I grew up in the era of
Highland Park’s lush prosperity, and I would have led a very middle-class life,
but every weekend, there I was on teeming 12th Street, working at my father's
record shop. I came to love the neighborhood and its people." Joe's
original record shop on Detroit's Eastside was bulldozed to make room for the
Chrysler Freeway and urban renewal which Joe and others astutely described as
"Negro removal."
Joe opened his new shop on 12th Street in Detroit's Westside
in 1960 while struggling with alcoholism and Addison’s Disease. Seven years
later, civil strife and conflagration consumed the 12 Street neighborhood in
what history notes as the Detroit Riots. Some social historians and Black
Detroiters have come to describe the event as "The Rebellion" as the
social and economic forces leading to the insurrection of July 23, 1967
predated the event by decades.
As a direct result, Marsha became an activist during the
turbulent 1960s. The late General Baker, a founder of the League of Revolutionary
Black Workers, became a surrogate father to Marsha. Highland Park had top
schools during Marsha Battle’s early years and she was a good student, trained
in classical music. Reeling and adrift, as her father’s drinking and conflict
in the home worsened, she got pregnant at the age of sixteen and never
completed high school. Her father died in 1973. Shirley worked after Joe's death cleaning offices for the Ford Motor
Company. Shirley was able to support her two youngest
children and put them through school. She passed away in 2008.
Marsha went to work at the Frito-Lay snack plant in
Allen Park, Michigan to support her son, and at twenty-two year old had
another son. After eleven years at the Frito plant, the single mother of
two came into her own when she was elected to lead Local 326 of the Bakery,
Confectionary, and Tobacco Worker's Union, at the age of twenty-eight. Her
election was notable on several counts because she was the first African
American, the first woman, and the youngest person to ever serve as union
president representing workers from Frito-Lay, Taystee Bakeries, Hostess
Bakeries, Wonderbread, and many other affiliated bakers and confectioners
in Detroit and beyond.
Her main cause was to fight concessions that management
was trying to enforce throughout the industry. Marsha brought new blood and
energy to the job. “The people who work in these shops pay my salary, put
clothes on my back, and feed my kids. I have to represent their interests.”
The father of her second son was an on-air news personality
on WABX, and Marsha spent much of her twenties as what she calls a “rock
chick.” With her father’s country blues and gospel roots, her love for the Motown Sound, the British Invasion, and hard rock music on Detroit’s underground
radio station expanded her musical appreciation ever wider.
Marsha, a voracious reader, loved to write since childhood,
but it was not until the growth of the internet that her writing took off in an
unusual way. Around 2000, while searching on eBay for a new watch, she struck
up a conversation with a seller which lead to an invitation to join an “online
wristwatch community.” She loved wristwatches and began to write about them on moderately and
high-end, international connoisseur’s watch sites.
Marsha also began to expand
on her writing and wrote about growing up in the Detroit music world. Much to
her surprise, in the world of watches there were some record collectors too who
recognized the names of her father’s record labels: JVB, Von, and Battle
Records.
Marsha realized there was knowledge about her
father’s recordings among blues collectors worldwide, but there was very little
known about him. A fire grew within her to return Joe Von Battle’s name to public
notice and gain him the recognition he deserved and was deprived of when his
larger legacy went up in smoke during that horrible summer of 1967.
Marsha also began writing for a group dedicated to music headed by rock critic Dave Marsh, who had long encouraged her writing. In 2008, she started a blog entitled Marsha Music. After a short time, she encountered many blues scholars on The Real Blues Forum, headed by author Paul Vernon, who were estatic to read stories about Joe's Record Shop.
Marsha, like her father, struggled with alcohol but adopted
a life of sobriety in 1987 at age thirty-three. She returned to her family home in Highland Park in 2000, but in a cruel irony it burned in an electrical fire in
2007. Marsha has been divorced twice and was widowed in 2018.
Through it all,
she has written about her life in Detroit. Under the pen name of Marsha Music,
she is an author whose essays, poems, and first-person narratives about
Detroit's history appear in many notable anthologies such as Sonic
Rebellion: Music as Resistance, Heaven Was Detroit, and A Detroit
Anthology.
Marsha is on a crusade to bridge the gap between Detroit's
past and its present. Lots of city history has happened in between, about which
Marsha writes and eloquently speaks. Marsha wears dramatic clothing, hats, and
turbans, striking a commanding presence wherever she appears. She is a much
sought-after speaker with a forward-looking message.
"[Detroit] needs a
restorative movement to heal what has happened here, as the working people of
the town competed against themselves over the right to a good life. We have to
share stories about the experiences of the past era. As we move forward in
Detroit, there must be a mending of the human fabric that was rent. Small
continual acts of reconciliation are called for here."
Marsha
has appeared on HBO, The History Channel, and PBS. In 2012, she was awarded a Kresge
Literary Arts Fellowship, and in 2015, the Knight Arts Challenge. In
2017, she was a narrator in the documentary 12th and Clairmount about
the origins of Detroit's civil upheaval of July 23, 1967. Her poetry was commissioned
for a narrative performance with the Detroit Symphony in 2015 and another
for the Michigan Opera Theatre in 2020.
Marsha is currently completing a
film project and book about her father. And if that wasn't enough, as of 2021, Marsha Battle Philpot began
serving on the Board of Directors of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
In
2020, Marsha retired after a career with the Wayne County Third Circuit Court system
of almost thirty years; currently, she lives in the Palmer Park district of
Detroit. Her long and distinctive list of accomplishments and her dedication to
public service have revived her father’s legacy as a Detroit music pioneer. Marsha’s achievements would make her parents proud.
Before Berry Gordy There Was Joe Von Philpot Producing Records in Detroit
The Detroitist by Marsha Music
