Now that I’m on the subject of music - and, more importantly, given that I am looking forward to possibly teaching at Berklee - I may as well do a writing loop on the blues. Let me focus specifically on the broader stuff I need to organize in order to teach general African American music history, but bear in mind that my affinity is for the blues.

Blues as a form, as a genre, and as an aesthetic: an overview of the various blues forms, examples from songs and from Langston Hughes’s poetry; very brief overview of genres and sub-genres, noting the geographic dispersion of different styles, and how styles began to borrow and work with one another more broadly as a result of the wider distribution of audio recordings; geolocate a bunch of blues recording locations using GoogleMaps, making a map of Mississippi with marked locations and links to recording session info and audio, for instance, mark the towns in the Mississippi hill country, link to pages with session info and audio playlists

The guitar: it may as well be a spoken-out-loud secret - I play the guitar. This informs everything I know about music since it is the instrument I play most often and understand the best; I need to make this apparent in my writing about music because I can never get away from it, unless, of course, I decided to switch my primary instrument or really work up an understanding of another instrument (bass, for instance); this all being said, playing guitar is an important way that I connect with music, and so the musical and historical choices I make while preparing for a class or writing something are infused with the fact that I am, primarily, just another guitar player; this is a problem for me because now I’m perceived as another one of those guitar wannabes who went into teaching rather than as a teacher with an expanded, musical skillset (Jesus, this writing is really atrocious); what can I do as a guitar player that would help me to teach the history I want to teach? should I just go with my affinity for the guitar and continue to teach the history from a guitar-centric perspective; despite what you might see on Rig Rundown, the guitar is an incredibly mobile and versatile instrument, talk about Atlantic theory and the distribution of instruments and recordings as something that has changed the sound of music globally; continue to blog about great guitar players like Hound Dog Taylor and Sonny Landreth, and don’t worry if I am heavy on the guitars and guitar players and guitar playing styles and gear and guitar setups and cetera….

Blues and prison: songs about prison, or the threat of prison, or about illegal acts for which the punishment would plausibly be prison; there is a history written about Parchman Farm Penitentiary, I forget the title, also a book about the rise of the use of prison as social control in the South following Reconstruction; Lomax did a bunch of recording at Parchman Farm in the 1930s and 1940s, maybe 1950s as well; in any event most of these recordings are available online to listen for free; make a connection to the contemporary prison-industrial complex, and to the concerns of movements like Black Lives Matters.

Blues and literature: pick out examples from Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literature, then find appropriate listening examples, focusing on the spirituals; re-read Mumbo Jumbo and come up with a playlist, need to include Haitian and Cuban music as well as the varied forms of blues, re-read parts of Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, particularly the scene with whats-her-name (Topsy?) who said that she wasn’t born to anybody, she jes’ grew; re-read The Souls of Black Folk and get together a playlist of spirituals along with info and lyrics from those quoted in Souls.

Blues women: re-read Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, get together a playlist with Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; pay particular attention to the lyric transcriptions at the end of Davis’s book; make sure to talk about Mamie Smith and all the other singers in this genre; geolocate their various recording sessions and look at the broader histories of those places at those times.