1. HISTORY OF ROCK DAY 2
6th grade

2. Remember. . .
Rock and Roll developed gradually. (Think about the Billboard Chart). It didn’t happen over night. It moved along with the changes in history and helped to shape culture, dance, fashion, politics, etc. It emerged from a music stew that included traditional country, honky-tonk, electric blues, jump blues, and R&B.
(Idiot’s Guide)

3. Enter the Blues. . . The sound of rural poverty
Essential Question: How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?
Sharecropping: black families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves; in return, they would give a portion of their crop to the landowner at the end of the year.

4. Sharecropping (1910s-1950s)
Good: Forced labor was over. Black families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves; in return, they would give a portion of their crop to the landowner at the end of the year.
Bad: Often resulted in sharecroppers owing more to the landowner (for the use of tools and other supplies, for example) than they were able to repay. Many went into debt or were forced by poverty or the threat of violence to sign unfair and exploitative sharecropping or labor contracts. Created a reliance on cotton in the South. Timing was not good. Price of cotton was falling 

5. The Blues. . . What it means, who’s got it, and why?
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. It was most likely performed in the rural South (country blues).
* 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.

6. Early Bluesmen. . Oh, the struggles I’ve known
Bo Weevil – Charley Patton (1929)
Alabama Blues – JB Lenoir (1965)
Cotton – Lightnin’ Hopkins (1959)
Questions for discussion:
What are they singing about?
Why did people want to sing it, listen to it?
Is the blues dead?

7. Essential Question #2
How did the Great Migration spread Southern culture, helping to give the Blues a central place in American popular music?

8. Muddy Waters (photo 1964)
In 1941, Alan Lomax and John Work, both musicologists, visited the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Working for Fisk University and the Library of Congress, the scholars were traveling throughout the Mississippi Delta to interview locals and survey musical cultures in rural communities.
One of the musicians they recorded at the Stovall Plantation was McKinley Morganfield, an African-American sharecropper who also went by the name “Muddy Waters.” Though Muddy worked full- time on the plantation, he also sang and performed the Blues as a solo acoustic guitar player. 

9. Bringing the blues from the country to the city - Muddy Waters
1943, Muddy left his home on plantation to live in Chicago. Within a decade of his arrival, he had launched one of the most significant careers of any American Blues artist. Between 1950 and 1958, Muddy Waters had 14 top ten songs on the Billboard R&B chart and was packing nightclubs with what was by that time an electrified band.
Got My Mojo Working – Muddy Waters (1963)

10. The Great Migration
Muddy Waters and a multitude of African Americans in the twentieth century left their homes in the South for urban centers across the Northeast, Midwest, and West. This internal dispersion, known as the Great Migration, is the largest internal movement of a population in U.S. history. Between the 1910s and 1970, over six million African Americans from the South headed towards cities including New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago, in search of a better life. 
Other artists, like Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley left the South to migrate north.

11. Analysis of the Great Migration and Music
 2. Look at the  two paintings created by the artist Jacob Lawrence.
Part of Lawrence’s Great Migration Series, which he completed between , the same year Muddy waters recorded his first songs in Mississippi. Explain that these images are a part of Lawrence’s Great Migration Series, which he completed between 1940 and 1941, the same year Muddy Waters recorded his first songs in Mississippi.
What do you see?
What’s is different between the two paintings?
Look at colors, images, movement, etc.

13. Entry Tix Discussions Entry ticket questions:
1. Where did Muddy Waters grow up? What was his name before he became known as Muddy Waters?
2. Muddy Waters writes: “Somebody once asked me what my blues meant. I answered him in one word -- ‘trouble.’” Describe what you think he means.
3. If your family has ever moved, for what reasons did you move? If you have never moved, what are some reasons people move today? How does it feel to move?
4. Discuss how a person’s life might change when he or she moves several hundred miles from their original home.

14. The importance of R&B as a musical gateway to the Rock and Roll of the mid-1950s
Essential Question: What did R&B bring to early Rock and Roll, and how was early Rock and Roll different?
One crucial "parent" to early Rock and Roll was Rhythm and Blues, or R&B. Swing bands went out, due in part to the wartime economy and the daunting costs of keeping a large ensemble on the road, smaller combos became popular.
Artists like Louis Jordan emerged in this moment, influencing a number of Rock and Rollers, Chuck Berry among them. As the R&B recordings reveal, these smaller combos retained the emphasis on horn sections, but, by virtue of being smaller groups of players, their sound left more musical room for other instruments. That being the time when electric guitar technology was getting more advanced, this meant that when the guitar players got more space, they met it with more volume. Thus the R&B sound edged toward Rock and Roll.

15. Rock and Roll vs. early R&B
Listen to LaVerne Baker’s Tra La La (1956): example of early R&B
Listen to Chuck Berry’s Maybelline (1965): example of early Rock and Roll
Students: Write down, first, the instrumentation you see and hear in each song, and, second, a list of adjectives that describe Baker's song and performance, and then Waters'.
Consider differences in vocal style, in the sounds of the instruments (sweet or rough?), in the performance styles of the singers, and in the overall moods of the songs.