Well, my name is Marsha Battle-Philpot, but I am also known as Marsha Music and I am a writer, sometime poet and I am a self-described Detroitist. Our family was not one to make the annual trek to the South, as so many parents had. I think that in my family they had no desire to cross that Mason-Dixon line again. They had no desire to go back. So I don't know what may have happened. I remember my grandmother telling me about having to hide from the Klan under her bed. They were looking for her brother and the Ku Klux Klan was trying to find him. And she was a little girl hiding under her bed – I remember that. I also recall that she was in a Jim Crow car... train car coming North when her child died... her boy died. She originally had five girls and two boys, but the two boys died in infancy and one of them died in her arms on the train. And she was unable to get help for him because of the intense segregation at that time. And she ended up carrying his body in her arms to her destination. 

My dad was from Macon, Georgia. My father was a very handsome man, brown skinned, handsome man, and he came North with his first wife and their four children and made a home here and he became involved in the record industry. He always said that he did not want to work for another man. And after he had been caught up in the layoffs in the auto industry, he did not want to be able to be the last hired and first fired anymore. And so he resolved to have his own business, and he created his record store called Joe's Record Shop on Hastings Street. It remained there from 1947 when he opened until 1960. And then in 1960, the powers that be determined to run a freeway straight through Hastings Street... wiped out a certain amount of generational wealth that could never be restored. But my father managed to somehow survive that, although he was never really the same after that. So that has been something that has really burned inside me, is to restore the name of Joe Von Battle to Detroit music history.