Course Description
Key African American musical voices from the 1940s to the present. Allowing "voice" to include instrumentalists as well as vocalists, this course focuses on the importance of key black musical careers in jazz, gospel, R&B, soul, and hip-hop as well as other genres of musical performance.
Athena Title
Modern Black Musical Voices
Non-Traditional Format
This version of the course will be taught as writing intensive, which means that the course will include substantial and ongoing writing assignments that a) relate clearly to course learning; b) teach the communication values of a discipline—for example, its practices of argument, evidence, credibility, and format; and c) prepare students for further writing in their academic work, in graduate school, and in professional life. The written assignments will result in a significant and diverse body of written work (the equivalent of 6000 words or 25 pages) and the instructor (and/or the teaching assistant assigned to the course) will be closely involved in student writing, providing opportunities for feedback and substantive revision.
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
In his essay, "Many Thousands Gone," James Baldwin wrote, "It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear." This course means to credit the most important and complex African American musical performers with "literary" achievement by, indeed, preparing students to hear the stories they had to tell (but, at times, didn't spell out) in their music. In this, when appropriate, we'll consult our primary texts (the recorded music)in combination with biographical information as well as with literary works inspired(at times authored by) these performers and their work. We'll also situate these stories and the ways they sound in relation to the historical/political work performed consciously and unconsciously, on and off stage, by the performers and by their audiences. The course will privilege artists whose work combines aesthetic virtuosity and social/political impact. Throughout the course, students will keep a rigorous writing journal matching quotations and citations from the course materials with reflections that connect those passages directly to concepts and themes from lecture and discussion. From these journals, students will develop an extended essay running across the arc of the course. Over the term, students will formalize sections of these essays, turn them in, and receive feedback from the instructor. As the term progresses, students will accumulate a folder of notes and drafts, which allows them to keep track of their progress and allows the instructor to chart their revisions en route to a final draft due on the last day of class. This method provides a semester’s worth of practical, technical guidance in writing while (based as it is on student journals) keeping the roots of the writing process personal and organic. It is meant to support students as they engage the process of writing at several stages.
Topical Outline
This course will arrange sequences of artists across genre whose careers span the decades from the 1940s to the present. Such performers will include: Charlie Parker, Paul Robeson, Marion Anderson, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Chaka Khan, Prince, Anita Baker, Luther Vandross, Tupac Shakur, Cassandra Wilson, Outkast, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, and SZA. In addition to the music (albums, singles, concerts) itself, which are the primary texts, the course will feature biographical, autobiographical works as well as poetry, plays, and fiction that intersects explicitly with the careers of key figures. Examples of literary/musical combinations include: Thelonious Monk's career in music traced alongside Robin D.G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. (1940s): Liliane Smith's (1944) novel Strange Fruit with Billie Holiday's recording of that song. Plus Gayl Jones's (1975) novel Corregidora. (1950s): Bob Kaufman's poems/Charlie Parker's innovations in Be-Bop. (1960s-1970s) Charles Mingus's music with his own autobiography, Beneath the Underdog combined with Santoro's biography of Mingus. John Coltrane's (1964) A Love Supreme with Michael S. Harper's book Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970). Nina Simone's music and career as a political voice in American culture in connection with her book I Put a Spell on You (1992) and with the film What Happened to Miss Simone? (2015). Marvin Gaye's Career alongside David Ritz's book The Divided Soul of Marvin Gaye (1985). Outkast's music from the mid-1990s with Liese Laymon's book of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (2013). The texts of Kendrick Lamar's albums To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and Damn (2016) considered for their poetic/lyric content as well as musical variety; considered in connection with a book like Wesley Lowery's They Can't Kill Us All: Fergusen, Baltimore and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement. Performances of contemporary feminist poetry in the work of Beyoncé, SZA and Rihanna from their albums 2015-2016.