The Current - Take a tour of Detroit’s historic Blue Bird Inn

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

The Blue Bird Inn on Detroit’s west side was the birthplace of bebop jazz and a hub for the city’s working-class Black community. Michelle Jahra McKinney gives us a tour of the venue, which closed 20 years ago but is now being revitalized as a music venue and archive. 

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On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. While Dearborn is majority Arab American, Detroit is a majority black city. About 78% of its residents are black, and it was the black community here that gave us some of the best music of the last century. Motown, of course, but more.

Jazz, techno, punk. The Bluebird Inn on Detroit's west side is the birthplace of bebop jazz. It was also a gathering place for the working-class black community in the city. That club closed in the early 2000s community in the city. That club closed in the early 2000s, but the Detroit Sound Conservancy is rehabilitating it, planning

to turn it into a music venue and archive. Oh yeah! Man, it's quite a sound system. It's a beautiful day. It is, and I'm so happy to be outside. I met up with Michelle Jara McKinney. She's leading the project outside the bird, as it's called. The Bluebird Inn has been so many things over time. It was a help to the black community because the guy that owned it was a numbers runner, right? So when you could not

depend on the systems of the big society to help you, you could come here and hook up with the people who were creating structure in your neighborhood, who loved you and who cared about you and who connected with you. It was a place where they could be somebody, even though society told them they weren't. Right across the street was the white neighborhood. This was the red line.

And across the street was the big system and things that you could or couldn't do across this side of the street. You could just be at home. The man with the keys has arrived. Can we go inside? Let's go inside. Yes.

You lead. Okay, come on in. Welcome, welcome. You have like an evangelical kind of fervor to this. Do you know what I mean? Like you speak with great passion about what this place could be. And what does it mean to you? My husband, Harold McKinney, he was a great storyteller.

And he was a great musician, composer, pianist, and a great gatherer. And so I think he was able to keep jazz alive, I say it like that. I'm taking care of the kids, and I'm watching how he goes out to the Detroit Public Schools. He gathers other musicians. He creates other musicians. Shoo-Bee-Doo, Wendell Harrison. He helped the people who were musicians bloom as teachers and mentors. This is why I'm so passionate. I saw the example of it. And then when he died, he lost about maybe two-thirds of his compositions in a flood that happened in our basement. So a lot of his stuff got lost. And so I saw that and I tried to fight against that.

So Detroit Sound Conservancy is my response. So just finally take me to 2027 when I walk back through the door here. Oh my God. Oh my, it's just, it's so, that's so dreamy. What a dreamy question. I just see that I can step back and sit down and watch my children continue to sustain this and figure out what they need for agency to teach their children to keep it going. to teach their children to keep it going. Here's Michelle's late husband, Harold McKinney, with Like, What Is This? For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.