ANTH3034W: Roots Music in American Culture and Society

This course focuses on aspects of southern American vernacular music that came to public attention in the 1920s and 1930s as commercial recordings and field recordings of rural music became available. Although the music had deep roots in the American past, it also underwent dramatic transformations as a result of the coming of industrial capitalism to the south and as a result of the commercial recording process itself. This music continues to profoundly shape popular music today. We will try to consider as many questions as possible during the semester, but we will focus especially on three sets of issues. First, we will consider the music in terms of the historical contexts that shaped it. Second, we will consider the cultural politics surrounding the music as we focus on question of how historical narratives, popular media and popular perceptions, and scholarly works represent and interpret (in often problematic ways) certain genres of popular music and what the politics of those representations might be; and we will consider also how we listen to “roots music,” how our listening is shaped by contemporary social and political circumstances. Third, we will attempt to understand musical genres in relation to the production of race and class and the experience of racial and class inequalities in the United States, and this may in turn prompt us to think critically about the idea of musical genre itself.

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