Module 2 African American Foundational Traditions

This module covers a single tradition that runs from the early decades of recorded music through the present: blues, gospel, R&B, soul, funk, hip hop, and contemporary Black popular music. It is the largest tradition in this course, and it is the tradition the rest of American popular music keeps returning to.

Module 2 takes a different shape from Module 1. Where Module 1's four tracks were arranged for cross-cultural contrast (Cooke against Cruz against DeSanto against Williams), Module 2's five tracks are arranged chronologically, because the module's argument is about how one tradition develops over time. Each track carries forward something the previous one set up. The order matters more here than it did before.

What is in this module

The pieces below are arranged in the order I recommend you complete them. The framing reading sets up the lineage and the political-work taxonomy that the listening guides assume. The five tracks come next, in chronological order. The discussion and quiz close out the module.

Reading.Roots and Routes of Black Popular Music
The framing reading. Covers what "foundational" means here, the roots of Black popular music in spirituals and the blues, the routes the music traveled through the Great Migration and the recording industry, the traffic between sacred and secular music, and the ways music does political work.
Listening 1.Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, "St. Louis Blues" (1925)
The recorded blues anchor. Smith's "Empress of the Blues" voice with Armstrong's cornet, recorded in New York for Columbia. The form, the vocal approach, and the dialogue between voice and instrument that everything downstream builds on.
Listening 2.Sister Rosetta Tharpe, "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944)
The gospel-to-rock pivot. A Pentecostal-trained Black queer woman with an electric guitar making a record that crossed gospel into the R&B charts and is now widely cited as a precursor of rock and roll.
Listening 3.James Brown, "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968)
The soul-to-funk turn. Recorded in Los Angeles at the height of the Black Power moment, with a children's chorus from Watts answering Brown's calls. The rhythmic shift to the downbeat, the politics in both lyrics and form.
Listening 4.Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Message" (1982)
Hip hop's pivot from party music to social commentary. Recorded in New Jersey for Sugar Hill Records as the Bronx and other Black urban communities lived through deindustrialization, drug crisis, and the rollback of civil rights gains.
Listening 5.Beyoncé, "Formation" (2016)
Black Southern identity claimed at the scale of mass American spectacle. The two-stage build from Houston-Atlanta trap to a New Orleans marching-band stomp, the Messy Mya and Big Freedia voices that share the song with Beyoncé, the family geography that opens the track, and the long lineage of Black political music the song closes.
Discussion.Pick a Reflective Question (in Canvas)
A discussion thread where you pick one of the five reflective questions at the end of the Module 2 listening guides and write about that track. Canvas will assign you two classmates' posts to respond to after the initial-post deadline.
Checkpoint Quiz.Module 2 (in Canvas)
A short quiz covering vocabulary from the framing reading and factual recall from the five anchor tracks. Low-stakes; you may retake it.

Deadlines

Module 2 unlocks as soon as you finish Module 1. The Module 2 quiz and the discussion initial post are due Sunday, June 7. The two discussion peer responses are due Sunday, June 14 (Canvas will assign you two classmates' posts to respond to after the initial-post deadline). Modules 2 through 5 each have their own one-week window like this, in chronological order; Module 3 follows Module 2, and so on.

Expect roughly 10 to 12 hours of work for this module: the framing reading runs about 45 to 60 minutes, the five listening guides with their tracks and reflective questions take about 6 to 8 hours combined, and the discussion and quiz add another hour or two.

A note on this module's content

This module engages with the experience of anti-Black racism, the violence of slavery and Jim Crow, the political struggles of the civil rights and Black Power eras, and the conditions that produced hip hop in the deindustrializing Bronx. The framing reading uses direct language about lynching as part of why people moved north during the Great Migration. Three specific items are worth flagging in advance.

The Track 1 listening guide on Bessie Smith covers her death in 1937 on a segregated highway outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, including a discussion of the persistent legend that she was refused care at a whites-only hospital (the legend has been disproved by biographers, but the historical conditions that made it credible are real and are part of how her death was remembered).

The Track 4 listening guide on Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" engages with urban poverty, drug addiction, and police violence in the 1980s Bronx, and traces the lineage from that record forward through conscious hip hop into Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" and the Black Lives Matter moment.

The Track 5 listening guide on Beyoncé's "Formation" engages directly with the Movement for Black Lives, including the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland, and with the song's reception inside the broader political conversation of 2016. The discussion is brief and historical, but the events it names are recent and politically live.

If you need to talk through accommodations to engage with this material, please contact me early and consult Accessibility Services.

How to reach me

Email is the best way: ines.thiebaut@csueastbay.edu. I check it regularly and will respond as promptly as I can. Canvas Inbox also works but I check it less often.

Office hours are Mondays and Thursdays 10 am to noon, by Zoom at https://csueb.zoom.us/j/5108853126. If those times do not work for you, email me and we will find another time.