Maki dishes on Detroit diskery over Michigan Public airwaves

On Wednesday, August 14, a segment based on my visit to Michigan Public headquarters a few weeks earlier was heard all over the state. On the day of broadcast, “Stateside” presented two features, and my appearance is the second. Click here to listen to the show via the web page for the August 14 edition of “Stateside.”

April Baer, host of the award-winning radio program, invited me to discuss a little bit about my book “Tomorrow Brings Memories — Detroit’s First Underground Record Company.”

Here’s a quick excerpt:

April Baer: The structure of the book has you spooling out the history of how these three [men] came together in little spurts and starts. And you’re very careful to show your work, in the places where we do have documentation of how they met, and how they worked together, and where you don’t. It kind of sounds like that’s the way you discovered it — in spurts and starts?

Craig Maki: Yes, absolutely. A local record collector named Cap Wortman hipped me to these records by loaning me a box of the 78s when I was about twenty-five years old … For several years I had no clue what was behind them, who did them — I had no idea they were done in the war era, during World War II. I thought for sure they were done after, because they sounded … so much more modern than the music I was used to hearing from the pre-war era.

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“A gem of a book”

Also check out this post at Joel E. Turner’s “Fiction and Other Things” blog, in which he presents a thoughtful review of “Tomorrow Brings Memories.”

You may find related music in Wax Hound Press playlists at Spotify and YouTube!

And you may order your copy of the book online at lulu.com. I signed a limited number for the Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan (and online here), and People’s Records in Detroit on Gratiot Avenue, near Eastern Market.

For more about the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama,” see my post ‘Hamtramck Mama’ celebrates diamond anniversary.