SYLLABUS

ANTH 337/AAS 337: Anthropology of Blues Culture

University Of Mississippi Online
Spring 2021

Instructor: Scott Barretta

Introduction

Around 1903 W.C. Handy, an African American musician living and working in
Clarksdale, first encountered the blues while waiting on a train in nearby Tutwiler.
Handy, later dubbed the “father of the blues” for his work in popularizing the music,
recalled in his memoir that the slide guitarist he saw produced “the weirdest music I
had ever heard.”
Handy’s reaction suggest s the relative newness of the music at the time—most
scholars agree that the music likely developed in the late 1890s or early 1900s. A
second encounter with blues in Cleveland, Mississippi a short time later alerted
Handy to the economic potential of the music, and by the 1910s he achieved success
through publishing blues songs.
Handy didn't quite "discover" the blues, as it was already being played by others
—most notably agricultural workers across the South, and soon by African
American musicians in cities across the country. While the blues reflected the
difficult social and political conditions faced by African Americans, it also became a
major commercial phenomenon, and over multiple decades changed in tandem with
other broader changes in American society.
Today, over one hundred years after its emergence the blues and its related
imagery are widely known around the world, and it remains closely associated with
Mississippi. In 2003 the U.S. Senate and Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove
declared the “Year of the Blues”, providing official recognition to a cultural tradition
that has long been taken for granted.
A “Mississippi Blues Commission” was created to promote blues-related tourism,
and in 2006 the state introduced the Mississippi Blues Trail, a series of historic
markers that will serve to both educate local communities and draw tourists to sites
across Mississippi. In December of 2017 the 200th marker was dedicated, and
markers are located in places as far away as Los Angeles and Norway, and, most
recently, in Liverpool, something that reflects the profound influence of the blues on
the world's music.
The motto "the birthplace of America's music" was for the last decade
emblazoned on welcome signs on the interstates entering Mississippi as well as on
the state's standard license plate, which also featured a picture of B.B. King's guitar,
"Lucille." In September of 2008 the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center,
a fifteen million dollar project, opened in King's hometown of Indianola, and
multiple other blues and music museums have opened in response to a broader
wave of "cultural tourism" that celebrates Mississippi's culture and attempts to
boost its economy.
Required Textbooks

Deep Blues by Robert Palmer

This well-written and easily digestible book covers the basic story of the blues from
its roots in Africa through Mississippi and up to Chicago, with stops in Helena,
Arkansas, and Memphis. This is by no means a definitive history of the blues, but it
covers many of the important bases, and is well suited or both novices and those
with a basic familiarity with the blues.

Write Me a Few of Your Lines – by Steven Tracy

This volume collects writings on a wide array of topics, including the roots of the
blues, blues and religion, blues and politics, and the blues’ influence on other forms
of music.

The Blues: A Very Short Introduction - by Eljah Wald

This book is actually what it sounds like. It contains a number of short essays on
essential topics in the blues.

There will also be additional readings on various websites and via PDF files

Course Learning Objectives

This course examines the blues as a genre with a glorious past that continues to
evolve today, often in ways that confound mainstream understandings of the genre.
We will directly address some of the popular myths about the blues such as the
popular notion that it is "sad," and examine the history and social/cultural roles of
the blues genre by drawing upon more general anthropological and sociological
insights. For the most part, the anthropological/sociological aspect of this class is
implicit, in the sense that we will not spend much time discussing formal theory or
methodology. Some of the main anthropological/sociological topics we will be
examining include:

 how the blues can be seen as reflecting broader societal values and political
conditions
 the organizational, technological, and economic forces that have shaped the
blues as a commodity
 how the blues reflects broader attitudes about religion, politics, and
sexuality.

In turn, the methods through which we examine the blues can likewise be applied to
other popular culture forms
The specific subjects we will address include:

 The African and European roots of the blues

 The social and political conditions that produced the blues and continued to
affect the blues over time
 How lyrical themes reflect these conditions
 Regional and rural/urban variations in the blues• The effect of technology on
the music’s development
 The music’s multiple roles as an emotional outlet, a platform for political
commentary, entertainment, and secular religion
 The blues’ influence on other forms of popular music, including country and
rock’n’roll, and its relation to contemporary musics including hip-hop
 Blues as a commodity on the marketplace: Who produces it? Who gets the
benefits?
 The changes to the music when it was adopted or “revived” by white
audiences
 The changing cultural status of the music and its role in cultural tourism

Course Learning Objectives

Learning objectives describe what students should know, think and/or be able to do
by the end of the semester. While I don’t expect you to become a fan of the blues,
after completing the course I think that you should be able

- to talk and write about the emergence of the blues and its major changes over the
past century in terms of its relationship to broader social and economic
developments

- to understand that change in popular music stems not only from artists’ talent
talent or audience demand but also the actions of the “culture industry,” notably
labels, producers and media outlets

- to develop an understanding that the moral issues that are often associated with
contemporary popular music are not new. Issues of women’s empowerment,
political rebellion, and spiritual challenges could all be found in similar expressions
in the music of a century ago

Course Expectations

Students are expected to read assigned materials, submit assignments, and

participate in discussions for each lesson. Students should follow the lessons
sequentially from first to last. The lessons and their associated assignments are
intended to emphasize the primary concepts from each section. Expect to spend 4-5
hours per each of the 12 lessons including readings. Don’t get behind!
Grading

This course uses a plus/minus scale

A 93-100
A- 90-92
B+ 87-89
B 83-86
B- 80-82
C+ 77-79
C 73-76
C- 70-72
D 60-69
F -60

Please note that I do not use the “point system” in which your grade is calculated as
a percentage of the accumulated points you receive for each assignment. Instead,
your grade for the course will be broken down by percentages, as follows:

Mid-term exam - 25%

Final exam – 25 %

Research paper - 25%

Written assignments – 10 %

Class participation / Discussion Forums - 10%

The Midterm and Final exams contain both short essay and multiple-choice
questions, and will be oriented toward demonstrating your basic understanding of
the historical development of the blues, and important themes as discussed in the
assigned readings and lectures. I am not interested in testing you on small details,
such as birth dates, but you are expected to know generally where artists fit in time-
wise in terms of blues' evolution. Detailed study guides will be provided a week
before each exam.

The Midterm – week of March 1-5 (more precise dates will be available soon after
the beginning of the semester). I usually have the Midterm proctored, but I will not
this year. It will take the form or essay questions about the readings, and you can
take it from a computer of your choice.

The Final Exam (week of April 26-30) will also not be proctored, and you will be
able to take it from a computer of your choice. The Final will not be comprehensive,
but will just cover material from the second half of the class.
A Research Paper of 5-6 pages will concentrate on a topic of your choice. You will
have the choice of writing on a broader theme (some aspect of blues in relationship
to economics, politics, popular culture, etc. or on a particular artist). I’ll provide a list
of potential topics and help individual students pick a topic that suits their interests.

The papers will be introduced just after the Midterm, as I want you all to be
generally familiar with the blues before starting to do a paper. There are three basic
steps. You will turn in a potential topic, several weeks later an "annotated
bibliography" that demonstrates you have been researching your topic. The
research paper is due on Thursday, April 22

Weekly assignments associated with each lesson are intended to ensure that you
have read and comprehended the lessons. It is in your interest to spend a good bit of
time on these as they will make the exams that much easier. Generally speaking,
your written assignments will be 300-500 words, and will mix summaries of the
articles/readings with your own examples.

Please note that you will generally get a good grade for successfully completing
these assignments. Over the course of the class you will receive many grades for
these assignments, but please keep in mind that they only constitute 15% of your
final grade! The assignments will be made available when the individual lessons are
presented. There will be drop boxes for each assignment, and the due dates will be
clearly posted.

Discussion Boards are associated with every lesson. In the past there has been a
strong correlation between activity in the discussion forums and grades. In general,
full credit will be given to those of you who make thoughtful posts and responses to
other posts every week.

Class participation will be assessed largely through participation on the weekly

discussion boards. Students will vary in the amount of time they feel necessary or
care to spend on the course site, but it is clear to instructors when you are not
paying adequate attention. Not showing up for class on a regular basis may lead to
your being dropped from the class. This is an expressed policy of Ole Miss Online.

While the lecture itself will generally not take a lot of time to read, you should
expect to check in to the course at least several times a week to monitor the
discussion forums. Your attendance in terms of logins and time spent on the the
system is automatically monitored by the computer and can be easily--and is!--
regularly checked by the instructor.

Likewise, we can also monitor whether students are opening e-mails that we have
sent to them, and have an overview of your participation in various forums. I realize
that one of the reasons that many of you are taking this course and other online
courses is to avoid the time strictures of classroom courses, but it is in your interest
to create some sort of weekly routine in order not to fall behind.

Attendance

We will be verifying your attendance, particularly in the first week to make sure you
are actually engaged with the course, and your record of logging in and spending
significant time with the lessons will also calculate into decisions to allow a W grade
or whether you can make up work. Here’s the University’s statement:

The University must abide by federal guidelines to verify the participation of online
students. For all course types, including thesis, internships, labs, online courses, etc.,
the instructor must verify your participation based on some type of participation. This
may include submission of an online assignment or other course related contact with
the instructor. (However, simply logging into Blackboard will not count as an
academically related activity.)

ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT (INCLUDING PLAGIARISM)

According to the University of Mississippi Academic Conduct and Discipline policy,

“[t]he University is conducted on a basis of common honesty. Dishonesty, cheating,
or plagiarism, or knowingly furnishing false information to the University are
regarded as particularly serious offenses.” The applicable full UM policy regarding
Academic Conduct and Discipline should be consulted by any student concerned
with academic misconduct or plagiarism. The Policy includes the procedures for
addressing alleged academic misconduct. Students must maintain the expectations
of student conduct described in the M Book.

There are multiple way in which plagiarism—the use of others work without
giving due credit—may come into play in the work for this course.

In the discussion boards, if you find some interesting arguments from sources
you’ve found in books or on the web don’t simply cut and paste those arguments,
but tell me where you got them. In other words, provide the source and if you are
using the exact wording place the text you copied in quotes AND have a sentence or
two of your own explaining why you are using the quote. Quoting others is one of
the main ways that academics communicate!

In weekly assignments I am particularly leery of plagiarism. You are expected to

write about your reactions to the readings in your own words. Sometimes it’s
apparent to me that instead of doing this a student simply looked up the topic on the
Internet and then pasted a summary. If you have trouble with the reading
assignments it’s fine for you to write about that; I’m interested in your thoughts
about the material, not something I would expect an academic to write!
In the research paper you are expected to clearly indicate what material came from
your five or more sources. I often encounter students who say that they are having
trouble filling up the paper. One way to do this is to use multi-sentence quotes from
your sources as long as you use a citation (ex. Barretta, p. 35) to let us know where
the quote originated. Likewise, you should have a general citation when you
paraphrase (to summarize someone else’s unique ideas in your own words)

For the Midterm and Final Exam there are essay questions, and you are allowed to
bring some notes about these questions. Because you have access to these sources
(and not just your memory) you should be careful to either use quotations if you are
using exact text, and if you do use quotes remember to always frame them by
demonstrating your understanding of the quotes through sentences in your own
words.

Plagiarism video – the University has created the following short video to help
you understand the nature of plagiarism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1HI0i-Br4Y&feature=youtu.be

UNIVERSITY WRITING CENTER

One of the best ways to improve your writing is to work with writing consultants at
one of the University's Writing Centers. On the Oxford campus, the Writing Center is
on the 3rd floor of Lamar Hall, and it otherwise accessible online. Writing
consultants will work with any student writer working on any project in any
discipline. To learn more about Writing Center locations, hours, scheduling and
services please go to http://rhetoric.olemiss.edu/writing-centers/.”

DISABILITY ACCESS AND INCLUSION

The University of Mississippi is committed to the creation of inclusive learning

environments for all students.  If there are aspects of the instruction or design of
this course that result in barriers to your full inclusion and participation, or to
accurate assessment of your achievement, please contact me as soon as possible. 
Barriers may include timed exams and in-class assignments, difficulty with the
acquisition of lecture content, inaccessible web content, and the use of non-
captioned or non-transcribed video and audio files.  If you are already approved
through SDS, you must log in to your Rebel Access portal at sds.olemiss.edu to
request approved accommodations. 
If you are not already approved through SDS, you must contact Student
Disability Services at 662-915-7128 so that office can 1) determine your eligibility
for accommodations, 2) disseminate to your instructors a Faculty Notification
Letter, 3) facilitate the removal of barriers, and 4) ensure you have equal access to
the same opportunities for success that are available to all students.
TECHNOLOGICAL ISSUES

In the “Introductory Message” there is a link that you can use to test if your
computer is compatible with Blackboard. If you have other technical problems it’s
unlikely that I can help you, but we have a great team at the Ole Miss Online
Technical Support Desk, which is available Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to
5:00 p.m. For Blackboard support, please contact the IT Helpdesk at 662-915-5222
or helpdesk@olemiss.edu