Browse Items (19 total)
- Tags: United States
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The Old Folks at Home
Minstrel songs were part of 19th-century pop music. "The Old Folks at Home" was originally sung from the perspective of an enslaved person longing for his life on the plantation. The song remains Florida's state song but its lyrics have undergone…
Statesboro Blues
The song could be used as an example of the loose narrative and supernatural references and/or folk beliefs often found in the blues genre. Though the song lacks a linear narrative, the collection of somewhat unrelated vignettes which included…
Tags: genre: blues, U.S. South, United States
Southern Hospitality
This rap provides a space for expression about various topics such as race, the Confederates' legacy, amongst other things amidst the generally, more conservative South. The key characteristics of the subgenres of Southern Rap and "Dirty South Rap"…
Tags: genre: rap, U.S. South, United States
Song of the South
This song could be used to introduce students to the gradual shift away from the pastoral way of rural southern life that once dominated the region and the New Deal. The south had traditionally been more agrarian than the north and the songwriter Bob…
Somos más americanos
This song may be used to introduce students to an eloquent historic-cultural argument criticizing anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States.
Ode to Billie Joe
"Ode to Billie Joe" is an account of how each of the members of a Mississippi family take the news of Billie Joe McAllister's suicide. A number of ambiguous details in the narrative, which emphasizes loss and was released in 1967, lend itself to a…
Tags: genre: country, suicide, U.S. South, United States
My Clinch Mountain Home
This song can be used to introduce students to the influence that Appalachian music had on modern country music. Many early country songs were based on British ballads and were combined with musical influences from African-American musical traditions…
Tags: Appalachia, genre: country, nostalgia, U.S. South, United States
Mississippi Goddam
Written in direct response to the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama Church bombing which killed 4 African American girls, this song can be used to instruct students on the shifting attitudes surrounding the conversation on race relations and the Civil Rights…
Massa’s in de Cold Cold Ground
This minstrel song can be used to teach about minstrelsy and antebellum Southern attitudes towards slavery. It was such a popular genre that it effectively was a type of pop music. In the song, the enslaved are mourning the loss of a deceased slave…
Knoxville Girl
This song could be used to introduce students to murder ballads, a subgenre of folk music. Like many other Appalachian murder ballads, "Knoxville Girl" is an adaptation of British broadside ballads. Once brought over to the States, these ballads were…