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Thread: I'm teaching the U.S. since 1865 survey again this semester, for the first time in a few years. Teaching remotely, I've been setting up songs for students to listen to as they log in. They set up the themes for each day and give students a chance to chat before I begin
Here's a link to the music list that I made in 2016. Many but not all of the early semester materials have remained the same, but I've made a lot of changes to the late semester so I'll share them in the thread here https://patrickiber.org/2016/11/20/the-soundtrack-of-the-u-s-survey/
I'll begin with the Great Depression materials: the obvious one is Bing Crosby's "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" ; the deeper cut is the Carter Family's "Worried Man Blues"
The next lecture, on the New Deal, comes in with Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" and "We're in the Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933
The next class is on the Popular Front, and it comes in with Josh White's "Southern Exposure" (whose music I learned about via @mkazin) and a close listen to Paul Robeson's "Ballad for Americans"
Next is a two-part lesson on World War II, with "Boogie Boogie Bugle Boy," , "Blood on the Risers" and "Rosie the Riveter"
The Cold War comes in with Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" in Belgium, reflecting the new place and politics of jazz and Louis Armstrong singing "The Real Ambassador," showing the contradictions of U.S. self-conceptions of freedom
The lecture on Affluence and Exclusion in the 1950s gets Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock () and Chuck Berry's Maybellene
The Civil Rights Movement(s) of the 1960s lecture starts with Sam Cooke "A Change is a gonna come" and Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind", which inspired Cooke
The culture of the 1960s gets "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and Loretta Lynn's (1975 song, I know) "The Pill"
And the politics of the 1960s leads in with the incomparable Nina Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam"
Nixon and backlash politics comes in with Neil Young's "Southern Man" and the song written in response, Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama"
Once class starts we all listen to the greatest thrill of all (other than White Lightning), Merle Haggard's "silent majority" anthem "Okie from Muskogee"
For the Vietnam War the students see CCR's "Fortunate Son," #39;s "Ohio" and Jimi Hendrix's performance of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock
For the transition from Carter to Reagan, it's the Charlie Daniels' Band with the overdetermined song "In America"
But the lecture on the 1980s has a "cultural contradictions of capitalism" argument about MTV and the culture wars, so more important are embedded videos of Madonna's "Like a Prayer" and Public Enemy's "Fight the Power"
The end-of-the-Cold-War, globalization-and-the-90s lecture has the Scorpions' "Wind of Change" , Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the SLTS shovel
For 9/11 and the Wars on Terror you get the contrast of Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" with Green Day's "American Idiot"
The global housing/financial crisis and the Obama administration get introduced with Courtney Barnett's "Depreston" and Young Jeezy/Nas "My President"
