Wiki Page, History of Rock-n-Roll: THE BLUES: THE SOUND OF RURAL POVERTY

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2022-06-03T23:29:38-06:00

Bill Tatnall in Frederica, Georgia, 1935

ESSENTIAL QUESTION

How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?

OVERVIEW

“As I began to get into the history of the music,” writes Amiri Baraka (writing under the name LeRoi Jones) in his book Blues People, “I found that this was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people. [The Blues] was the history of the Afro-American people as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, narrative… the music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of Afro-American life.”

In the beginning, the Blues was music performed by poor African Americans for audiences of poor African Americans, and a reflection of their common experiences in the Jim Crow South.

The Blues were one of the few forums through which poor, rural African Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries could articulate their experiences, attitudes, and emotions. They made music about heartbreak, the challenges of their lives as sharecroppers, the relentless Mississippi River floods, and about the often harsh conditions of post-slavery life.

This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi.

You will “stop” in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping.

You will study a particular Country Blues song at each “stop” and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it.

You will create a scrapbook of your journey, in which you’ll record and analyze what you learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping.

INDIVIDUAL & GROUP ACTIVITIES

Please complete: Graded Activity - The Jim Crow Era and The Blues