HSEM2091V: Roots Music in America: Music, Movies, and Mysteries

This seminar focuses on "roots music," the early twentieth century southern vernacular music that has inspired virtually every genre of American popular music over the last seven decades. Everything from hip-hop to rock to jazz to bluegrass to "Americana" to folk to the singer-songwriter tradition and beyond has been profoundly shaped by the roots music we'll study this semester.The course is divided into three parts. In the first, we'll examine the meanings the music had for the people who made it and recorded it in the early decades of the twentieth century: African-American singers, blues musicians, and 'songsters' who labored in the south under oppressive Jim Crow conditions and forged new musical traditions; and white Appalachian peoples who were moving from farm work to work in coal mines and textile mills and combining European musical traditions with those of African-Americans to create new sounds and new sonic landscapes. In the second part of the course, we'll examine what the music means to us, to contemporary audiences, by analyzing recent films in which roots music is featured and its story told. And in the third part of the course, we'll ask what the music has meant to scholars and analyze the ways in which, from the 1930s to the present, they've traversed the south with notepads and recording devices to preserve the music and to learn about the musicians. Here we'll dip into the vast repositories of primary source material now available online (field notes, recordings, photographs, interviews) and try to find new ways to understand and appreciate roots music for ourselves, and try to solve some of its mysteries.

View on University Catalog