Diverse Cultures and their Musics Fall 2020

 OK, ok. I know that it looks like I skipped a blog here (as per your syllabus), but hear me out. It's that point in the semester when things start piling up, so I'm going to make an adjustment in the blog schedule: This week: No Blog Next week: Music and Family Following week: Cool Stuff Middle East and India Sound ok? So, about Music and Family. This will be our final blog where your turn the gaze of ethnomusicology back around your direction. You're not doing this one alone, though, which is why I'm giving you an extra week. Most of us have our first musical experiences with our families, and you can often give credit for some of your personal musical taste to those experiences--whether you share those opinions or rebel against them. Too, one of the Big Points of this class is to explore how music and culture are interrelated, and cultures are built out of families. So for this blog, you're going to find out more about how someone in your family relates to music....

 Time for some serious  bloggin'.  For this blog, rather than exploring one of our class cultures further or turning the ethnomusicological spotlight back on your own experiences, 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. In Dr. Mr. Vaneman's lecture about the blues, he pointed out that 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 he showed, the blues were born from the very poorest of Southern American society and, by birthing such genres as Rock, Country, and R&B, has 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 nature and initially connected to underprivileg...