Day 2 of class

I have to admit I fall in love with this class more and more as time goes on! We mostly studied the origins of blues music today, starting with the slave trade in the southern United States. We talked about the music they would use in the fields to make the work go by faster and also to create a steady rhythm between all the workers. While the following is a recording of a chain gang in the 30s, it's believed that the slave songs in the fields sounded much like this:

We also talked about "gandy dancers" which were the black railroad workers that would manually move the tracks. I had some knowledge of them because my father has told me about watching them in South Carolina when he lived there back in the 50s and 60s. It went a little like this:

We also touched on the music in the church, since church was one of the few times the slave community could come together and congregate outside of the cotton fields and plantation houses. Here's what we listened to:

We discussed the geography of the Mississippi Delta, which actually is an incorrect name for it, since a "delta" refers to the area around the mouth of a river. It's more of a flood plain with very rich, fertile soil, which was perfect for all the cotton grown there.

We did get into the Civil War and Reconstruction, which was a good discussion. Mainly focused on post Civil War southern culture. Monday we'll start on Jim Crow laws and go into the actual time period when the blues developed.