Cultural Histories of the Blues: From the Chicago Renaissance to Sinners

Undergraduate / Graduate

The Blues set the template for American popular music in the twentieth century. But its influence was felt across all corners of the arts, and beyond. In this class, we will explore the musical history of the Blues, from its roots in the US South, through the Chicago of the Great Migration, to its explosion across the globe. But we will do so in tandem with considering its tremendous cultural reach: in literature, philosophy, art, and film. We will examine how poets like Langston Hughes found in the Blues a new poetic language; how philosophers and political thinkers like Amiri Baraka, Albert Murray, and Angela Davis found a powerful social analytic; how artists like Archibald Motely and Romare Bearden spun music into a new visual language; and how filmmakers-most recently Ryan Coogler-turned to the mythology of the Blues to reanimate the Southern Gothic in Hollywood. Across these domains and more, we will consider how the Blues-as sound and idea-became a cypher for notions of race, class, and respectability in twentieth-century culture, and how these notions continue to play out in the present day.