Blues and jazz are two distinctive musical expressions of American Culture which also reflect American social life. Growing out of the African-American experience, the blues provide a focus through which to see many aspects of twentieth-century social history in America, such as problems of racism or poverty, or industrialization and urbanization. This course will seek to explore the ways in which blues expresses the American experience in musical form and how it also provides an indicator of American society.
 The course will concentrate on the developments of blues in Chicago and on the social life associated with those developments.  In addition, there will be a number of guest speakers in the course, predominantly blues musicians. One of the originators of Chicago blues, Dave Myers, is already scheduled.

Requirements:
           This course will run as a workshop seminar. This means that there will have to be active participation by students. "Workshop seminar" also implies an exploratory approach,  and it is hoped that the class will be able to take advantage of guest blues musicians who happen to be performing in the South Bend area, as well as a number of invited guest speakers tentatively invited.
            Students are expected to complete the readings before class and to participate actively in class discussions. For most classes, there will be one student assigned to lead discussion of the materials, and one student will be assigned to play a tape of a blues tune of the student's choosing for discussion at the beginning of the class. Grades will be based primarily on three papers (roughly 90%), the first two papers approximately 5-7 pages. The remainder of the grade to be determined by class discussion and 1-2 brief pass-fail papers.

Readings and Materials will include:

Leroi Jones  Blues People
Mike Rowe  Chicago Blues
Peter Guralnik Feel Like Going Home
Mitchell Duneier Slim's Table
Elijah Anderson A Place on the Corner
Alan Lomax  The Land Where Blues Began

VIDEO
Searching for Robert Johnson
Maxwell Street
The Promised Land   (Nicholas Lemann)

AUDIO
The Blues: A Smithsonian Collection of Classic Blues Singers