Bobby Bare – "Detroit City" (1963)

By day I make the cars

By night I make the bars

Between 1940 and 1960, about seven million poor whites took the “Hillbilly Highway” out of Appalachia and settled in Detroit and the other manufacturing centers of the upper Midwest.

An Appalachian family in 1940

One magazine article described the Appalachians as “clannish, proud, disorderly, [and] untamed to urban ways.”  When Detroit residents were surveyed concerning what kind of people they found most undesirable, hillbillies ranked second only to criminals.

Poor whites weren’t the only ones who left the South in the post-World War II period in pursuit of the American dream.  About five million African-Americans emigrated from the South during the forties, fifties, and sixties and moved to the Midwest and West in the hope of finding not only higher-paying jobs, but escaping “Jim Crow” segregation.

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The previous 2 or 3 lines featured “Born to Run,” a song sung by a young man who was eager to leave behind the limitations of life in his hometown and strike out for a new place where he could achieve the American dream.  He doesn’t know where that place is, but he’s sure there’s a better life for him out there somewhere. 

Today’s featured song picks up that young man’s life a few years later, when he’s beginning to think that maybe life back home wasn’t so bad after all.

Postwar Detroit may have been a place where even a poor, uneducated Southerner could make some serious do-re-mi working in a Ford or GM factory, but leaving behind your family and friends was a high price to pay for a well-paying job.  

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Bob Dylan’s 2022 book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, consists of short, impressionistic essays on 66 very different records – everything from “Mack the Knife” to “My Generation” to “Viva Las Vegas” to “Ball of Confusion” to “The Whiffenpoof Song.”

“Detroit City” was the very first of the 66 songs that Dylan wrote about in that book.  Here’s part of what he had to say about it:

In this song you’re the prodigal son.  

You went to sleep last night in Detroit City. . . . From the postcards [that you sent home], everybody assumes you’re a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they’re not, and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming.  Your life is unraveling.

You’re going to take your foolish self-love and egotism and go back to what’s familiar, back to the ones that’ll stand by you . . . You’re going back to where you can clear your life up, going back to people of understanding.  The people who know you best. 

But Dylan thinks the singer is just fooling himself if he thinks that going back to where he came from is going to make everything right again:

This is not so much the song of a dreamer, but the song of someone who is caught up in a fantasy of the way things used to be.  But the listener knows that it just doesn’t exist.  There is no mother, no dear old papa, sister, or brother.  They are all either dead or gone.  The girl he’s dreaming about got married to a divorce attorney and she has three kids.  Like thousands of others he left the farm, came to the big city to get ahead, and got lost.

Thomas Wolfe famously said “You can’t go home again.”  Dylan agrees with him.

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“Detroit City” was a top ten country hit for Bobby Bare in 1963, winning the Grammy for Best Country & Western Recording.

Country-soul artist Arthur Alexander – the only songwriter whose songs have been recorded by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan – covered “Detroit City” in 1965.  

As one reviewer noted, the message of that song – that you might come to regret your decision to leave home and head to Detroit (or wherever) in search of greener pastures – is one that black Americans could relate to every bit as much as poor Southern whites.

None of the dopes who suggested songs for the CBS Sunday Morning “Essential American Songbook” mentioned “Detroit City.”  But that record was good enough to be the first one that Bob Dylan wrote about in his book, and it’s good enough to be included in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK.  

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Click here to listen to Bobby Bare’s 1963 recording of “Detroit City.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.