Toast of the Town: The Life and Times of Sunnie Wilson

By John Cohassey and Sunnie Wilson

Book Overview

As part of the great migration of southern blacks to the north, Sunnie Wilson came to Detroit from South Carolina after graduating from college, and soon became a pillar of the local music industry. He started out as a song and dance performer but found his niche as a local promoter of boxing, which allowed him to make friends and business connections quickly in the thriving industrial city of Detroit. Part oral history, memoir, and biography, Toast of the Town draws from hundreds of hours of taped conversations between Sunnie Wilson and John Cohassey, as Wilson reflected on the changes in Detroit over the last sixty years. Supported by extensive research, Wilson's reminiscences are complemented by photographs from his own collection, which capture the spirit of the times.
Through Sunnie Wilson's narrative, Detroit's glory comes alive, bringing back nights at the hopping Forest Club on Hastings Street, which hosted music greats like Nat King Cole and boasted the longest bar in Michigan, and sunny afternoons at Lake Idlewild, the largest black resort in the United States that attracted thousands every weekend from all over the Midwest. An influential insider's perspective, Toast of the Town fills a void in the documented history of Detroit's black and entertainment community from the 1920s to the present.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814343872
• ISBN13: 9780814343876
• Release Date: February 2018
• Publisher: Great Lakes Books Series
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

I was there.........

I was there. The stories are all true, Sunnie was exactly that: "sunnie", always a smile and ever dapper, he was the consumate host. The Mark Twain Hotel was a great place to meet the most famous jazz musicians in informal settings while they lounged or rehearsed. As a young, white broadcast engineer traveling with a national jazz radio program, I must say the Hotel was more like a home away from home than a Hotel. I stayed in room 38. Good times. Great book.

The Mayor's platform was "A porkchop in every fridge"

and Sunnie Wilson lived up to that motto by giving back generously to the black community. His motto might also have been "a bed and good meal for every musician" because he owned and operated the Mark Twain Hotel expressly for that purpose. BB King, Dizzy Gillespie,Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and many more stayed there. Sunnie also ran several show bars in Detroit's "northern" Paradise Valley. The book contains hundreds of stories having to do with musicians whose names are very common today. He was also very influencial in the political climate of the 1930 and 1940s in Detroit, and provides much insite into those times. Some of his greatest successes occured in the rich entertainment district that centered around John R, where today the Detroit Medical Center sits. To understand the history, you have to read the book, almost nothing remains of what was sometimes called the "near eastside ghetto". A great read. It reads like a novel, but leaves you with hard facts that easily pop up in conversation, and give perspective into the future.