Write a review of the song “Street of Laredo”
The main lesson of this unit is that country music has a rich and complex ancestry – the product of a number of co-mingling forces. Each artifact of the genre contains the traces of all of those forces. A partial list of these complexities: The easiest path to a successful paper is to demonstrate this complexity.
Inherited tradition – Country Music inherited existing musical traditions
Stories – County Music represents the need for certain stories to be told
Style – Country music is defined by developing stylistic approaches to playing music
Instruments – Country music is associated with the development/popularity of specific instruments
Market Forces – Country music is a business; created and developed as the result of a variety of business decisions
Socio-political context – Country music is born in a country shaped by a socio-politcal reality
Prompt for Paper 1:
Looking at this list above ^^^, every country song – down to the instruments and the style of performance – contains within it a rich and complicated story. Every country music song is a time capsule – shine a light on it, the light prisms and refracts and shines in a thousand different directions, telling a thousand different stories…stories of the artist, stories of a region, stories of a country, of a culture, of a race, of politics, stories of technological innovation, and hundreds of other histories too numerous to categorize.
For Paper 1 – choose one song, and demonstrate the complex history contained within. Your thesis should highlight something important that you take from that complexity – some important thing this song can show us…maybe about the history of country music, or American history, or the concept of “tradition” itself. As a suggestion: you can go to work on the complexity while you are constantly rethinking the thesis. The goal of your thesis – don’t say anything obvious. Say something compelling, something in between the lines of what you learned in these first two weeks of content. Even though you’ve only been thinking about this for two weeks, you have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole. You have thought about things relatively deeply…you already have a lot to say.
Module 1: Song Bank
-Hard Times
-Streets of Laredo
-Crazy Blue
-You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down
-Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane
-I Just Can’t Help It
-All songs from “Introduction” Playlist
