Module 5 European American Immigrant and Working-Class Traditions

This module covers the cultural-roots tradition that is hardest to hold steady as a single category. The communities the module covers (Ulster Scots and Anglo-Scottish settlers in Appalachia; Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the New York entertainment industries; Italian, Irish, and Polish urban Catholic working-class neighborhoods; and the mid-twentieth-century European-trained synthesizer pioneers) did not begin the twentieth century thinking of themselves as a single white group, and the long process by which they were re-sorted into one is itself part of the story the module tells. Module 5 traces what happened in American popular music as that re-sorting unfolded, and how each thread carried its own distinct musical inheritance forward while staying in continuous dialogue with the others and with African American music.

Module 5 takes a different shape from Modules 2, 3, and 4. Where the earlier modules each traced a single tradition or a constructed panethnic category, Module 5 covers four distinct threads inside a category whose boundaries shifted across the period the module covers. The five tracks span twenty-four years (1956 to 1980) and the four threads named above. The opening and closing tracks (Frankie Lymon in 1956 and Bruce Springsteen in 1980) sit on the same urban Catholic working-class thread, a generation apart, and bracket the module structurally: between them, the same neighborhood music economy is re-sorted along racial lines that are part of the broader process the framing reading traces.

What is in this module

The pieces below are arranged in the order I recommend you complete them. The framing reading sets up what "whiteness as a process" means as a category, traces the four threads' separate histories, and names what the module leaves out. The five tracks come next, in chronological order. The discussion and quiz close out the module.

Reading.Roots and Routes
The framing reading. Covers Matthew Frye Jacobson's three-period account of American whiteness as a historically shifting racial category, the long American process by which European-immigrant communities were re-sorted into a single "white" category, and the four threads the module covers: the Ulster Scots ballad tradition, the Eastern European Jewish songwriting tradition, the Italian-Irish-Polish urban Catholic working-class tradition, and the synthesizer pioneers. Also names the threads the module leaves out (Scandinavian American and German American Lutheran traditions, French Canadian traditions, the Mediterranean and Balkan diasporas) and the late-twentieth-century endpoints (punk, heartland rock, indie folk) that pick up the threads after the module closes.
Listening 1.Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" (1956)
The urban Catholic working-class thread opens here. A racially mixed teenage doo-wop group from upper Manhattan (three Black members, two Puerto Rican members), recorded for the Jewish-immigrant-owned independent Gee Records, in the street-corner harmony scene that included the Italian, Irish, and Polish Catholic teenagers in the same neighborhoods as audience and as part of its sound. The listening guide covers the doo-wop scene, the integrated street-corner economy, and what one of the most enduring American pop singles of the 1950s sounded like before its racial sorting was complete.
Listening 2.Joan Baez, "Mary Hamilton" (1960)
The Ulster Scots ballad thread. A child ballad from the Anglo-Scottish-Irish tradition, recorded by a nineteen-year-old Joan Baez on her self-titled debut album for Vanguard Records, at the opening moment of the early-1960s folk revival. The listening guide covers the long ballad tradition from the seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish border country through its American transmission to Appalachia, the folk revival's institutional infrastructure, and the analytical question of what Baez's restraint as a singer is doing on this particular song.
Listening 3.The Drifters, "Up on the Roof" (1962)
The Eastern European Jewish songwriting thread. A Goffin-King composition recorded by the Drifters at Atlantic Records, produced by the Leiber-Stoller team, arranged by Garry Sherman, with strings in a system the framing reading describes as the Brill Building. The listening guide covers the Eastern European Jewish immigration of 1881-1924 that built the songwriter community on the Lower East Side, the Brill Building system and its structurally racist division of labor (a mostly-white, disproportionately Jewish American songwriter cadre writing for a mostly-Black vocal-group cadre, with the writers and publishers retaining most of the income), and the moment a Goffin-King song became a Drifters hit.
Listening 4.Wendy Carlos, Switched-On Bach, Third Brandenburg Concerto, first movement (1968)
The synthesizer-pioneer thread. A solo electronic recording of J. S. Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto, produced over a year of layered Moog-synthesizer overdubs in a Manhattan apartment, released by Columbia Masterworks in October 1968. The album sold a million copies, won three Grammys, and was the commercial event that established the synthesizer as a popular-music instrument. The listening guide covers the European-academic and American-engineer streams that produced the instrument, Carlos's training at Columbia-Princeton, her collaboration with Robert Moog on the custom modular synthesizer she used, and the downstream Black popular music adoption from 1971 forward (Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Bernie Worrell, Herbie Hancock, the Detroit techno pioneers) that the synthesizer thread set up.
Listening 5.Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (1980)
The urban Catholic working-class thread closes here, the second of two anchor tracks on the same thread Track 1 opened. A first-person family-narrative song recorded by Springsteen with the E Street Band at the Power Station in August 1979, drawn directly from conversations with his brother-in-law about losing construction work in the recession of January through July 1980. The listening guide covers Springsteen's three-line Dutch-Irish-Italian family heritage, the Freehold mill-town context, the song's borrowed-first-person narrative voice, the 1980 release into the recession-and-election moment, and the way the recording pulls in three of Module 5's four threads at once as the module's closing argument.
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 5 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 5 (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 5 unlocks as soon as you finish Module 4. The Module 5 quiz and the discussion initial post are due Sunday, June 28. The two discussion peer responses are due Sunday, July 5 (Canvas will assign you two classmates' posts to respond to after the initial-post deadline). After Module 5 closes, the rest of the term is devoted to your final project.

Expect roughly 10 to 12 hours of work for this module: the framing reading runs about 60 to 75 minutes (it is the longest framing reading in the course), the five listening guides with their tracks and reflective questions take about 7 to 9 hours combined, and the discussion and quiz add another hour or two.

A note on this module's content

This module engages directly with the structural racism of postwar American federal economic policy, with the long history by which European-immigrant working-class communities were re-sorted into a single "white" category, and with the unequal dialogue between European-American and African American music that runs through every track. Three specific items are worth flagging in advance.

The framing reading discusses the GI Bill, the Federal Housing Administration mortgage system, and the union shops of the postwar economy as deliberately racist programs that funneled federal subsidies to white families while explicitly denying them to Black families. The discussion is structural rather than incidental; it is the ground the module's whole argument about whiteness-as-a-process stands on.

The Track 3 listening guide on the Drifters covers the Brill Building system, which the framing reading describes as structurally racist in a specific way: the mostly-white, disproportionately Jewish American songwriter cadre wrote for a mostly-Black vocal-group cadre, with the writers and the publishers retaining most of the rights and most of the income. The discussion includes specific royalty and wage figures.

The Track 5 listening guide on Springsteen engages with the 1980-1982 recessions, the deindustrialization of the Northeast, and the political reception of "The River" as a recession-era working-class document; the political consequences of the moment the recording registered are still working themselves out across American politics more than four decades later, and the listening guide does not pretend otherwise.

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.