Big Blog no. 1: American Roots Music

 guitar with a network of tree roots coming out of the fingerboard

 Time for some serious bloggin'. 

For this blog, rather than exploring one of our class cultures further or turning the ethnomusicological spotlight back on your own experiences, you're going to select a unique topic, do some research on it, and create a blog post to teach your classmates about it. Here's the catch: your Big Blog no. 1 needs to be on a genre (or sub-genre) of American Roots Music.

One of the unique aspects of American-born musics is that they inevitably well up from the bottom rungs of society before spreading across the globe. As we'll discuss, the Blues were born from the very poorest of Southern American society and, by birthing such genres as Rock, Country, and R&B, have basically conquered the world. This, in essence, is what American Roots music is--kinds of music that were born on American soil, musics that are almost always syncretic nature and initially connected to underprivileged communities. 

So, first, select your specific type of American Roots to research and blog about. Here is a list of possibilities--you can pick something not on this list, but run it by me first:

  • African-American Spirituals
  • Gospel
  • Bluegrass
  • Country (specify early, later, etc.)
  • Zydeco
  • Appalachian folk
  • Shape-note hymnody
  • Doo-wop
  • Soul
  • Funk
  • Hip-Hop
  • Swing
  • Western Swing
  • Tejano
  • Salsa
  • Rock&Roll (the early, 1950s kind)
  • Rockabilly
  • Sub-genres of Rock (check with me, make sure it's basically American, as opposed to British)
  • Sub-genres of Jazz (again, check with me)
A good place to start wandering through some of these and other possibilities is, believe it or not, the Wikipedia entry on Music History of the United States.

In terms of scope, think of this as a short term paper, but more informal, and with a fair amount of media embedded. As a guidepost, aim for about 1000 words, plus media. You'll need a handful of sources at the end (use full citations in MLA, APA, or Chicago style, rather than just web addresses), but you don't need to include footnotes or parenthetical references. We need something of the history of your topic--how and where did it get started, what earlier music genres fed into it, what were some of the early musicians in your genre--as well as an over-all description of your genre--what instruments are involved, what vocal styles, what are typical lyrics like, etc. While a bit of fan-girling is just fine, do remember that you're teaching other people about your chosen topic, and they need to learn about that topic from you.

And a slightly different instruction: by next Thursday's class (April 8), would you please leave a comment on this blog letting us know what your topic will be. That way we can try to avoid the entire class doing the same topic (a few folks overlapping is fine, but I don't think any of us really want to read thirteen different histories of Bluegrass....), and you can see who is doing what topic before you start your comments, so that if you're interested in a particular genre that you didn't do yourself you can aim for it.

And a brief word on timing. I'm posting this prompt way in advance, so that if you'd like to get started over our brief break you can have that option. Please don't finish and post your blog until the actual week that it's due, though--because almost all of these possibilities have some of their roots in the Blues, I want you to have at least the background that we'll gain during next week's classes to build on. 

Finally, here's a fun graphic, by the ever-awesome Matt Groenig. You might know him as the guy that created The Simpsons.

Comic that traces American popular music, linking such real musics as Disco, Country Lite, and New Age Music with funny sounds such as car alarms, primordial ooze, and hillbilly hollering


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