An Exploring of the Impact of African American Music on Popular Music: the birth of Rock’n’Roll Students will compose an analytical essay placing a significant artist and a particular work (i.e., a recording or performance) into historical context, including a discussion of the aesthetic, social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions that informed its production and its resonance.

The paper should consider both syn chronic and diachronichistorical perspectives, situating the work in its particular historical moment as well as showing how it speaks to broader trends of tradition, innovation, and influence. Connecting specific musical features to historical forces, your essay will examine the ways that artists’ aesthetic choices can be understood historically. Your paper should also aim to contribute to our ongoing discussion of the course’s core concerns and themes, including but not limited to: the maintenance and transformation of African core conceptual / aesthetic priorities and values, the impact of the “color line” on American music (and vice versa), the strategic embrace or militant refusal of the “mask” of minstrelsy, the jook continuum, sacred and secular interplay, migration and regionalism, Afro-modernism and Black Arts movements, “racial uplift” and assimilationist efforts, interracial exchanges and coalitions, appropriation and exploitation, integrationist and anti-racist movements, black nationalism and self-determination, the long struggle for Civil Rights and economic justice.