When the Swan Sings on Hastings
Living Detroit Series
by Thomas Galasso
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Pub Date Apr 08 2017 | Archive Date Jun 25 2020
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Description
Novel about the decline of Detroit's famed Paradise Valley entertainment district, which experienced an artistic and economic Golden Age from the 1920s to mid-1960s. Headliners included The Four Tops, Jackie Wilson and Della Reese.
From the back cover: Detroit, 1956—Cars were rolling off the assembly line, jobs were plentiful, and some great music was being created and performed in a district called Paradise Valley. The Valley’s main artery, Hastings Street, was the center of it all. Paradise Valley was an exciting collage of culture—jazz and blues, vice and illegal numbers running—a mecca for after-hours establishments where blues greats like John Lee Hooker and jazz giants like Dizzy Gillespie often played until well into the morning hours. Its businesses were mainly black-owned and everyone seemed to look out for one another. However, all that changed when “urban renewal” caused Paradise Valley to recreate itself and to relocate in an age of racial segregation. When The Swan Sings On Hastings is a journey through the underbelly of Paradise Valley, its circle of musicians, numbers runners, hustlers, business owners and the everyday inhabitants struggling to deal with the loss of their neighborhood.
Advance Praise
"Thomas Galasso has written a stunning first novel that is uniquely set in 1950s Detroit in Paradise Valley. Galasso takes his readers on a journey in to the African American cultural epicenter of the clubs, culture and music on Hastings Street. The author's research is beautifully woven into his engaging narrative.
M.L. Leibler, 2017 Michigan Library's Notable Book Award winner."
Available Editions
| ISBN | 9780998527871 |
| PRICE | $16.00 (USD) |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Shannon B, Book Trade Professional
I am a lifelong Southerner, except for the several years I lived in the Detroit suburbs and then Chicago; it was interesting to get a perspective on this city that I spent so much time in, so many years after the time-frame of this work, when it is so comfortable in it's state of urban decay that it's almost impossible to imagine it any other way.
"They are the waitresses with sore feet hustling trays of food through a maze of tables. They are the clerical workers tapping away madly on typewriters amidst a ringing chorus of telephones. They are the custodians mopping floors, their ears buzzing from the hum of a whirring vacuum cleaner. And these are just a sample of the workers that make up this great working city.
They are Detroit."
Set to a chorus of R&B and Jazz appropriate to the time and showcasing the black business owners who thrived there, and the way that everyone in the area was a family, the texture and the layers of this story make me sorry that this is a Detroit I will never see in my lifetime, although echoes of the kindness and the "we're all a family" essence are alive and well long after segregation and hatred forever changed the way that this section of the city existed, and continues to exist to this day.
Fraught with the racial tension that still plagues Detroit and painted amid a vibrant background that has since faded to a tired grey, this 2017 novel by Thomas Galasso is an especially loving tribute to a city that gives it the heart, the beauty, and the grit that is so representative of the people who make their homes there.
Beautiful.
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