Life in the Mississippi Delta

Warm Up: Review what life was like during the Jim Crow Era. Write one or two sentences. Mr. Wilks will pick someone to share.

In this lesson you will take an imagined road trip through Mississippi to visit two sites where you will learn about African-American life in the South in the early part of the 20th century, and how that life was reflected in Country Blues music.

You will visit two stations where you will examine a series of artifacts including film clips, photographs, visual art, and readings.

In groups, we will answer a series of questions about these artifacts.

The first questions will come from your previous knowledge in social studies class.

·    Station 1: Yazoo City in the Mississippi Delta

 https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7988103,-90.5346978,9.75z. 

Poor southerners, black and white alike, lived in the shadow of natural disaster. Students will examine songs, paintings, and imagery to learn about the floods, pestilence, and drought that threatened the lives of southern field workers. 

Question 1) What is a delta?

Question 2) What is a flood plain?

Question 3) How do flood plains make agriculture possible?

·         Video: Bessie Smith, “Homeless Blues” (1927)

Question 4) What is the song’s subject matter?
Question 5) What are the key words, lines & arguments in the lyrics?
Question 6) Which instrument(s) do you hear?
Question 7) What mood does the music create?
Question 8) What emotions are you meant to feel while listening?

·         Video: Charley Patton, “Bo Weavil Blues” (1929)

Question 9) What is the song’s subject matter?
Question 10) What are the key words, lines & arguments in the lyrics?
Question 11) Which instrument(s) do you hear?
Question 12) What mood does the music create?
Question 13) What emotions are you meant to feel while listening?

·   Image: Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series, Panel 8 and Panel 9 

Question 14) What is the subject of the painting?
Question 15) What is the mood of the painting?
Question 16) What does the painting suggest about the conditions that helped created the Blues?

Image: Photo of destruction from the 1927 Mississippi River flood

Question 17) What is happening in the photograph?
Question 18) What connections can you find between this photograph and some of the other texts at this station?

Station 2: Hillhouse, Mississippi.
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.134613,-90.853222,13z

Even though slavery was abolished after the Civil War, African-American and white tenant farmers lived a life of grinding poverty under the rules of sharecropping. Students will examine texts to learn about this economic system.

·         Video: Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Cotton” (1959)

     Question 1) What is the song’s subject matter?

Question 2) What are the key words, lines & arguments in the lyrics? 

Question 3) Which instrument(s) do you hear?

Question 4)What mood does the music create?

Question 5) What emotions are you meant to feel while listening?

Sharecropping Source: PBS website for American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/e_sharecrop.html 

A Tough Place for Blacks

          The [Mississippi River] Delta may have been beautiful, but work there was hard. Slavery and cotton production became synonymous with the Southern economy and Mississippi. Since the Mississippi Delta was the last area of the South to be settled, after the Civil War, the state became among the most reactionary and repressive states for African Americans. Blacks lived with the daily and ever present threat and reality of violence.

Locked into Poverty

       Although blacks outnumbered whites, the sharecropping system that replaced slavery helped ensure they remained poor and virtually locked out of any opportunity for land ownership or basic human rights. The system grew from the struggle between planters and ex-slaves on how to organize production. Planters wanted gang labor, like they had used under slavery, to work the fields; freed people wanted to own and work their own land.

How Sharecropping Worked

       Under the system, the sharecropper rented a plot of land and paid for it with a percentage of the crop -- usually 30 to 50%. Sharecroppers would get tools, animals, fertilizer, seeds and food from the landlord's store and would have to pay him back at incredibly high interest rates. The landlord would determine the crop, supervise production, control the weighing and marketing of cotton, and control the recordkeeping.

Hard Work and Low Pay

       "We'd get $12 per bale and we had to pick hard in order to have money to buy food during that season," said Mississippi State Senator David Jordan, whose parents were sharecroppers. "If we had a rainy week where we couldn't pick at all, then we would have no money. We would have to go get food and substances on credit." At the end of the year, sharecroppers settled accounts by paying what they owed from any earnings made in the field. Since the plantation owners kept track of the calculations, rarely would sharecroppers see a profit. "Some came out in the hole five or six times and they never did get out of the hole," Jordan said. "So what happened, they caught the midnight train or bus and headed to Chicago and they never found 'em, 'cause that was the only way to get out of that miserable situation."

Question 6) How did the sharecropping system work?

Question 7) In what ways and to what extent did sharecropping re-create slavery for Southern African Americans?

·         Image: Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series, Panel 17

      Question 8) What is the subject of the painting?

      Question 9) What is the mood of the painting?

      Question 10) What does the painting suggest about the conditions that helped created the blues?

·         Images: Dorothea Lange, Photographs of Sharecroppers (c. 1937)

·         Cotton sharecroppers. Greene County, Georgia, 1937

      Question 11) What is happening in the photographs?

      Question 12) Specify at least four specific connections between   the photographs and the other texts at this station.

      Question 13) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

·         Poor mother and children, California, 1936

     Question 14) What is happening in the photographs?

     Question 15) Specify at least four specific connections between the photographs and the other texts at this station.

     Question 16) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

·         Sharecropper's cabin and sharecropper's wife, ten miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, 1937

     Question 17) What is happening in the photographs?

     Question 18) Specify at least four specific connections between the photographs and the other texts at this station.

     Question 19) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

     Thirteen-year old sharecropper boy near Americus, Georgia, 1937

     Question 20) What is happening in the photographs?

     Question 21) Specify at least four specific connections between the photographs and the other texts at this station.

     Question 22) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

      Formative Assessment:

      Writing Assignment

      How did the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life? Be sure to make specific references to the artifacts seen and heard in this lesson.

      Write a minimum of three paragraphs.

The Blues Continued

Review:

In your own words, define the following:
1) Segregation
2) Jim Crow Laws

3) What types of places were segregated during the Jim Crow era?

Let's watch a video clip of Howlin' Wolf performing "I'll Be Back Someday" (1964). 

4) What is the message Howlin' Wolf gives in his lyrics?

5) Imagine why he might be saying this?

6)   Read the quote below, from the 1963 book Blues People, by Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones):

"[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."

7)    Discuss in your groups and answer these questions:

a.    What does Baraka mean in this quote?
b. How does Howlin' Wolf embody this?
c. Put Baraka's ideas into your own words?

8) Write two paragraphs explaining what the Jim Crow era was and how it influenced African American music--the Blues. Due today.

Origins of the Blues

Hip hop and Rock music of today comes from what is called Blues music. Let's look a little deeper to see where blues music came from...

Study this picture and write down what you think is happening.

Have you heard of "Jim Crow" laws? If so, what is it?

The Jim Crow Laws were created in 1876 simply to segregate black people from the white population. - See more at: http://www.historyinanhour.com/2013/09/23/the-jim-crow-laws-brief-summary/#sthash.Qa7Y8Dee.dpuf

As a class, lets answer these questions:

1) What is the origin of the phrase, "Jim Crow?"
2) What did the southern states do in 1938?
3) What is segregate?
4) What types of places were segregated?
5) What did President Johnson do in 1964?

“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.”

6) Who does Amiri Baraka say the blues is the history of?

In the beginning, the Blues was a 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, about the challenges of their lives as sharecroppers, about the relentless Mississippi River floods, about the harsh mastery of white landowners.

7) African Americans shared their experiences through the blues. What types of things did they write about?

Now lets listen to a rap song by Nas called "Bridging the Gap."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVpjlxI8JoI


"Bridging The Gap"

[Nas talking]
"The light is there."

[Intro: Olu Dara singing]
See I come from Mississippi
I was young and runnin' wild
Ended up in New York City, where I had my first child
I named the boy Nasir, all the boys call him Nas
I told him as a youngster, he'll be the greatest man alive

[Verse 1: Nas]
Let's go!... Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey -- 
Tribrary of these rap skits, styles I mastered
Many brothers snatched it up and tried to match it
But I'm still number one, everyday real
Speak what I want, I don't care what y'all feel
'Cause I'm my own master, my Pop told me be your own boss
Keep integrity at every cost, and his home was Natchez Mississippi
Did it like Miles and Dizzy, now we gettin' busy
Bridging The Gap from the blues, to jazz, to rap
The history of music on this track
Born in the game, discovered my father's music 
Like Prince searchin' through boxes of Purple Rain
But my Minneapolis was The Bridge, home of the Superkids
Some are well-known, some doin' bids
I mighta ended up on the wrong side of the tracks
If Pops wouldn't've pulled me back an said yo
[Olu Dara singing]
Greatest man alive (Nas: Yeah, turn it up!)
Gre-Gre-Gre-Gre-Greatest man alive!

[Verse 2: Nas]
The blues came from gospel, gospel from blues
Slaves are harmonizin' them ah's and ooh's
Old school, new school, know school rules
All these years I been voicin' my blues
I'm a artist from the start, Hip-Hop guided my heart
Graffiti on the wall, coulda ended in Spoffard, juvenile delinquent
But Pops gave me the right type'a tools to think with
Books to read, like X and stuff
'Cause the schools said the kids had dyslexia
In art class I was a compulsive sketcher of
Teachers in my homeroom, I drew pix to mess them up
'Cause none'a them would like my style
Read more books than the curriculum profile
Said, "Mr. Jones please come get your child
'Cause he's writin' mad poems and his verses are wild"
[Olu Dara singing]
Greatest man ? The great-greatest man alive

[Verse 3: Nas]
Hey-Hey-Hey -- My Poppa was not a Rollin' Stone
He been around the world blowin' his horn, still he came home
Then he got grown, changed his name to Olu
Come on, tell 'em 'bout the places you gone to
[Olu Dara singing]
I been to Saudi Arabia, Mozambique
Madagascar, Paris, Greece
The Middle Africa is where we lived
Better known as Queenbridge
[Nas]
Nas, Nas you don't stop
Olu Dara in the house, you don't stop
Muddy Waters' Howling Wolf you don't stop
From the Blues to Street Hop you don't stop
Tell 'em Pop 

[Outro: Olu Dara singing / Nas adlibbing]
See I come from Mississippi (Let 'em know)
I was young and runnin' wild (Runnin' wild)
Ended up in New York City (Yeah!)
Where I had my first child (That's me)
I named the boy Nasir (Yeah, Daddy!)
All the boys call him Nas (Luh ya, boy)
I told him as a youngster
He'll be the greatest man alive (You the greatest, Pop)
Greatest man alive (You the greatest, Pop)
Gre-Gre-Gre-Gre-Greatest man alive!
Rest In Peace Ray Charles

a.    After listening to the lyrics of this song, where does Hip Hop come from? 

b.    According to Nas, what are the three types of music that bridge the gap?

The Elements of Music

Objective: Learn the elements of music using the following terms:

·         Tempo: - the speed of the music

·         Pitch: - the way in which notes appear high or low in relation to one another

·         Rhythm: - the length of certain notes, from short to long

·         Melody: - the 'tune', created by combining rhythm and pitch

·         Harmony: - when different pitches are played together at the same time to form chords

·         Texture: - the ways in which different lines of music interweave

·         Timbre: - the sound qualities of different voices and instruments

·         Dynamics: - different levels of volume, from soft to loud

Warm Up:

S. copy above list from promethean board.

T. say: We need to learn how to talk about music. Let’s watch this video to learn some basic music vocabulary which will help us learn how to talk about music.

Guided Practice:

1)    Whole group, listen to a song and point out examples of each of the elements of music.

2)    In small groups, S. choose songs to listen to and give an example of each of the elements for their song.

Formative Assessment:

Groups share answers with class.

Closure: Have students name the elements of music and what they mean.

Intro to the History of Rock: Day Two

 Warm Up: Describe what kind of emotion is being expressed in these lyrics, and what you think the corresponding music should sound like. 

            Hey, girl, I got something I think you ought to know.

            Hey, babe, I wanna tell you that I love you so.

            I wanna hold you in my arms, yeah!

            I’m never gonna let you go, ’cause I like your charms.

1) Listen to the clip of Led Zeppelin performing the song (the second verse begins at 0:48). Discuss the performance in your groups. Each person writes answers in complete sentences. Do not write questions:          

●     Did the music meet your expectations? Why or why not?

●     How does this song compare to the students’ list of love song features? Is it loud or soft? Fast or slow?

●     How does “Communication Breakdown” compare to “Would I Be Crying” by the Flamingos?

●     Does using the instrumentation of a Rock and Roll band (electric guitars, drums), along with the fast tempo and high volume, make this seem more or less like a song about romance?

2) The kinds of lyrics used in love songs can change over time, too. For example, listen to these two songs, one of which was written in the 1950s, before the feminist movement of the 1960s began, and one that was written at the beginning of the movement.

 “With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming,” performed by Patti Page

“You Don’t Own Me,” performed by Lesley Gore.

Discuss in your group which song you think is from which era, and why. List these on your paper together.

3) Compare and contrast the following three love songs, all from the mid-1960s:

“You’ve Really Got Me,” by the Kinks;

“She Loves You,” by the Beatles;

“Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” by Herman’s Hermits.

These three songs demonstrate different perspectives on relationships. In your groups, answer the following questions about each song:

●     Who is speaking?

●     To whom are they speaking, and what about? (Pay attention to nouns and pronouns.)

●     What perspective on the relationship in the story does the speaker have?

●     How does the music set the mood for the conversation taking place in the song? Is the song fast or slow? Soft or loud? What instruments are being used?

4) Writing Assignment:

Write your own love song lyrics, using the songs in this lesson as models.

First you must decide who will be speaking and to whom or what the song will be addressed (a boyfriend/girlfriend, family member, friend, pet, even a place).

After writing the lyrics, you should write a short description of the music you imagine might deliver the message of the song: Is it loud or soft? Fast or slow? What instruments might the musicians use?

Intro to the history of Rock and Roll

Make a list of your all time favorite songs and who sings them.

1) In groups, discuss and answer the following: What are some common themes/subjects of these songs? (What are they about?)

2) Groups share your list and answers. Choose one person to be the sharer.

3) Whole class answer the following:

            a) Lets list these songs in groups by subject or theme. What are the most popular themes?

            b) Does music have a special ability to express feelings that other types of art do not? Examples: paintings/drawings, movies, etc.

            c) What other types of feelings about relationships can be expressed through songs?

What will we study in this class:

The Blues

Bessie Smith

  

Charlie Patton

Muddy Waters and the Invention of the Electric Guitar

Bo Diddley

Johnny Cash

Elvis

Sister Rosetta Thorpe

Ray Charles

Led Ze

Beatles

5) As a class, watch the video of the Doo Wop group the Flamingos singing the song “Would I Be Crying” (1956), and discuss:   

●     Whose point of view is expressed in this song?

●     Whom is being addressed? How do you know?

●     What kind of message or story does the song have?

●     What do you imagine has happened to the singer and the person he is singing to?

6) Discuss the musical qualities of the song. What does the music sound like?      

●     Is the music happy or sad? What makes it sound that way?

●     What instruments are used in the background?

●     How do the performers present the song? Do they act out the lyrics in any way?

7) Play the video of Dion DiMucci (a singer-songwriter and leader of the Doo Wop group Dion     and the Belmonts), “Music as a Way Out,” starting at 1:34.  Ask:     

●     What does Dion say about emotional songs like the Flamingos’ “Would I Be Crying”? What is his “secret”?

●     Why might it be easier to sing rather than speak about emotions like love or heartbreak?