Big Blog I: American Roots Music

  

 Time for some serious bloggin'. 

For this blog, rather than exploring the way music intersects with some other aspect of society, 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 in 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; some, but not all, of the possibilities here are Heavy Metal, Indie, Disco, Punk, Grunge, Prog, Folk Rock, etc.)
• Sub-genres of Jazz (again, check with me; possibilities include New Orleans, bop, smooth, free, Latin, etc.)

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. Here are the specifics:

• A minimum of 1000 words
• At least four music selections we can hear, embedded into the body of your blog
• At least two images (pictures), also embedded into the blog.
• At least four sources, not including Wikipedia, that need to be cited in a bibliography at the end of your blog. MLA, APA, or Chicago style may be used for those bibliography citations. 
• If you use ChatGPT to help you generate ideas or other aspects of your blog, please tell me how you used ChatGPT as a part of your citations at the end of the blog.
• Information: 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. The purposes here are for you to learn about your topic, and then for you to teach your topic to your classmates.
• Once you have decided on your topic, please leave a comment on this blog letting us know what your topic will be. That way you can all see each others topics so that, when it comes time to read four of your classmates' blogs, you can choose topics you find interesting. (Also, that way we can avoid having the entire class do the same topic.)

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