Music and Protest in the African American Literature Course

Abstract

“Music and Protest in the African American Literature Course” demonstrates how music can be used in a literature course designed for first- and second-year students who are not music majors, and have not yet developed the advanced analytical and synthesis-building skills of third- and fourth-year students. It offers pedagogical practices designed to address these students’ needs, among them a Music Analysis Worksheet that allows them to respond both personally and analytically to the music they hear, and to develop metaphors for what they hear. The worksheet is general enough to be used in other courses or disciplines that include music in their course design.

Incorporating the study of music into a humanities course seems like a viable option for upper-level and honors courses where students’ analytical and synthesis-building skills are more advanced than that of your typical freshman or sophomore student. As an associate professor in an open-access, regional campus of the University of Cincinnati, I teach to student abilities ranging from those with GED’s in need of remedial assistance and tutoring to those on academic scholarships. Our classes also include a combination of traditional and non-traditional students, offered in 10-week quarters. One of my assumptions is that all of my students, regardless of scholastic background or age, possess at least a general interest in music, but can they write about it in a substantive way, or analyze it in light of, in my case, literary texts? My experience teaching an African American literature course where music is one of the texts proves that they can. This class also reveals the kinds of learning tools needed to help them do so.

In the spring quarter of 2008, I taught a topics-in-literature course titled “African-American Protest Literature,” and while the word music was not used in the title, it was very much a part of the course. I had taught African-American literature before without including music, using an historical approach and major texts from the first edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Gates and McKay, 1997). For the new course, using the second edition, I wanted students to investigate the relationship between African-American musical and written texts that give voice to protest – from moan to rage, from endurance to celebration, from vernacular to written to rap. I retained the historical organization but divided the course into four sub-topics, each requiring a short paper assignment, according to musical genres and period writings:

The Norton Anthology facilitates this approach; its editors deliberately included musical texts as part of the literary tradition of African American culture. The anthology provides a CD of songs, readings, and speeches, containing many recordings of the song lyrics provided in the text. Other recordings of their lyrics, as well as other songs in their genres are readily available elsewhere, either online, in music stores, or perhaps in your own music collection. With regard to the protest component of the course, Joycelyn K. Moody’s comment in the Norton Guide to Instructors suggests, somewhat sadly, an open field: “Nearly all African American literature falls into the category of protest literature.” (75) Many of the literary texts in the Norton Anthology directly refer to or allude to music or song, further facilitating text selections.

My assumptions about my students’ musical knowledge, which turned out to be fairly accurate, guided my pedagogy for this course. Except for the few musicians in the room, most of my students listened to music and knew what they liked, but didn’t know how music worked on even the simplest level, and could not begin to write about it. After discussing the syllabus and the terms of the course – literature, protest, music – in the first class, I used the second class to introduce some basic concepts of musical analysis. A music student myself, I brought in my guitar to demonstrate the difference between the sound and mood of a major chord, and those of a minor chord. Since most of my students had not been aware of this basic sound difference, it was clear they would need guidance in responding, not to just the meaning of the lyrics, but to the music of the songs we would play and discuss in class. They needed to understand, on a basic level, how the music reinforces the meaning of the lyrics before they could seek correspondences between the songs and the literary texts.

I took two steps to address this. First, students were required to locate source material either about music generally or specific genres related to the course. Given that these sources could then be used in their papers, most students sought genre material. Second, I developed a two-page “Music Analysis Worksheet” for both their in-class and out-of-class analysis of lyrics and music. The purpose of the worksheet was two-fold: 1) to help students discover the connection between musical sounds and the protest-related subject matter of the lyrics, and 2) to help students develop a descriptive metaphor for the song they had heard. The worksheet was designed for rapid note-taking while listening to the song, and more reflective writing afterward, allowing students to respond on both an emotional and analytical level:

Personal Response

1. What emotion/s do you feel while listening to this song?
2. What events in your life, if any, does this song make you think about?

Analytical Response

1. Do the lyrics:
   • Tell a story? What:
   • Express sorrow? Why:
   • Express anger? At what:
   • Express joy? About what:
   • Express hope? How, and for what:
   • Use humor? How:
2. List any instruments, including voice, you hear in the song.
3. Think of the song in terms of its organization (beginning, middle, end; or stanza by stanza; or stanzas and refrain), and the relationship of the music to the lyrics. At what point is the music:
   • slow paced:
   • medium paced:
   • fast paced:
   • soft-toned:
   • monotone:
   • loud:
   • using low notes:
   • using middle-range notes:
   • using high notes:
4. Select a moment in the music of this song that you find particularly powerful, moving, dull, or weak; or consider the song as a whole. If you were explaining this moment in the song, or the song overall, to someone who had never heard the song, what would you say it is like? Create a simile or metaphor to convey how this song works, and write it below.

Students were introduced to the form and its purpose before using it. In keeping with Barbara Tewksbury’s observation that students need to practice the application of concepts we teach in order to master them, the Music Analysis Worksheets were a repeated feature of the course. On average we devoted two to three class periods per sub-topic to the music. I selected one or two songs per sub-topic for class listening and analysis (students listened to the remaining songs on their own). We listened to each song twice, once for pure listening and a second time during which students filled out their Music Analysis Worksheet. After filling out the form in class, students shared their analyses in small groups and selected the best metaphors. Then as a class, we discussed their analyses and metaphors before moving on to the literary texts for that sub-topic. As a result of repeating this exercise, students began to pay attention to how the tempo, range, and tone of the music and/or voice related to the content of the lyrics, and this awareness, coupled with metaphors they developed, gave them substance for their papers. After group and/or class discussion of the literary text, we returned to the song (or songs to date) and sought correspondences between the music/lyrics and the literature. We considered the extent to which the songs, both lyrically and musically, used themes and imagery found in the literary texts or developed alternative approaches, reflected the context in which they were created, and gave voice to protest either directly or indirectly. Student papers for each sub-topic focused on these kinds of correspondences, found on their own in songs and literary texts they selected.

Initially I collected, read, and offered comments on the Music Analysis Worksheets, but as the course proceeded and students grew more confident in their listening and analytical skills, this was not necessary (they also turned in their worksheets with each paper). The most challenging aspect of the analysis for most students was developing the metaphor. Here the three-repeat strategy of worksheet, group discussion, and class discussion helped students meet this challenge. Also, students were required to incorporate some aspect of their worksheet material into each paper; this meant they had to return to what they had previously written, think critically about it, and use it as a source. For parts of each paper, then, the worksheet became a rough draft.

By using music as the primary organizing principle of the course, the historical approach to text selection offered some useful inconsistencies. For example, I used chapter XIV, “The Sorrow Songs,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk in the Spirituals: Antebellum Writing portion of the course, even though it was published in 1903, during the later New Negro Period. This not only allowed students to consider literary history from a nonlinear perspective; it also gave students a model for music interpretation and analysis early in the course. Du Bois’ interpretation of slave songs as the voice of protest reinforced the course’s focus on music as a form of protest. The subversive nature of slave spirituals interpreted as a code for slave meetings and escapes raises the issue of figurative language, providing a pathway to analysis of not only the songs as literary texts, but the literature of the course as well.

As the course proceeded, students recognized how pounding rhythms replicate the content in work and prison songs like “Po’ Lazarus,” and then reoccur in poems like Sterling Brown’s “Southern Road”; how jazz rhythms and twelve-bar blues structures are found in the poetry of Brown and Langston Hughes; how those forms tighten and repeat in Hip Hop and Black Arts Movement anger. Students learned to recognize the intersection of gender and race in the blues of Bessie Smith and songs like “You May Go but This Will Bring You Back” sung by Zora Neal Hurston. Our final project was to analyze the role of music in Spike Lee’s explosive film, Do the Right Thing, giving them the added benefit of forging connections between music, words, and visual images. Part of their analysis was devoted to the development of their own definition of “protest literature.”

While the assignments and activities described above involve fairly simple, perhaps obvious forms of musical analysis, these forms provide a good starting point for first- and second-year students. At the very least, the Musical Analysis Worksheet forces them to take note of the notes they listen to, and to identify the sound qualities associated with word meanings. This is a necessary first step to considering more complex interplays of music and language they could potentially encounter in upper level humanities courses, or in their lives as citizens in a world where combinations of language, image, and music are used rhetorically to sell products and concepts. Even as a one-time exposure to music in relation to other texts, a course using this worksheet helps students translate the music they hear into the written word, and hones and extends their interpretive and critical thinking skills.

Works Cited

• Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2^nd ed. New York: Norton, 2004.
• Moody, Joycelyn K. Teaching with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature: A Guide for Instructors, 2^nd ed. New York: Norton, 2004.
• Tewksbury, Barbara J. “Defining Effective and Innovative Courses: A Practical Strategy.” Workshop, University of Cincinnati Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, 10 February 2007.

Syllabus

Topics in Literature – 28-001-203-008

African-American Protest Literature

UC Raymond Walters College

Spring 2008 – MWF 12-12:50 p.m.

Professor Rhonda Pettit, Ph.D.

Course Schedule

Other Essential Information & Policies