This article focuses on the music education and enculturation of Motown musicians who grew up in greater Detroit. The early musical lives of Motown musicians are described--in the home environment, in schools and in black urban neighborhoods. Schools are shown to be spaces of musical nurturance, both in the context of the formal curriculum and in the school culture at large. The story provides a positive example of urban music education that can inform and inspire music education today. It helps identify factors that strengthen relationships between school and community; it highlights the ecological nature of school music located within a complex network of social and cultural institutions that contribute to music education; and it illustrates how schools and individual teachers can provide a space for students to perform music of popular idioms. It also provides evidence of the power of music in the lives of students as well as of the capacity of young people to generate and contribute to musical culture and to effect social change through their music-making. (Contains 52 notes.)