Even School Teachers Get The Blues

Every year as Valentines Day approaches, I reach down for The Blues.

Maybe I'm an eternal optimist, but broken hearts and sugar highs, crashing lows and buoyant thoughts of the salvation in love, are for me part and parcel of the celebrations of life and living in all people. But no one catches the beauty of living the reality of life, like the artists who created the Blues out of the raw call and response of African slaves transplanted into American fields and taking up residence in American heart beat and song. Their call for freedom, for love, for our care and compassion is a tune, a blues question posed, not yet fully responded to by our nation.
It is the Blues which brings us our pain, our reality and our truth. This is the reason for arts in the schools. It is the answer to the skeptic that searches for accounting. The Blues are the songs of a people creating and asking for the day when we will account for our sins to our brothers.
We lift our voice to sing for the hope of that day when we will all get there together.

To me the Blues are America's love songs.
Love that opens you inside out.
It's raw , passion, beauty and flame,
Can be silly sugar sweet, be foolish and flirty, make you the fool,
Wrap your pain, lift you on to another day forward, saved by the song.
Telling what the heart is hiding.
The Blues.


Or as I read tonight in The African American Century by Gates and West, "the work expresses the pathos of humor and the joy of despair." Yeah.

And too much sugar often brings about the lows that all of us know.
To love is to risk, to lose is.... The Blues. At least partially.
And the rest is all wrapped around oppression and rising up and into a better place through the arts.

We survive in our struggles through creation. And as a part of my ongoing month long series of posts dedicated to Black history Month grab up your John Lee Hooker, B. B. King and come along. When I was young in the 1960's, I knew the music we call The Blues because it birthed the sound of my times. Rock and Roll sprang out of the labor of the Blues.

So today my children, in my first grade enjoyed singing to Taj Mahal and The Fishing Blues along with other tunes he put together on his CD for kids.

Shake Sugaree: Taj Mahal Sings And Plays For Children
Taj Mahal

If you have a child or a classroom , this is a collection to get.
I recommend this to go with it:

Freight Train And Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes
Elizabeth Cotten

Shake Sugaree
Elizabeth Cotten (Artist)

It'll get you in a good place.

My kids sing with the lyrics written on ditto sheets for them to follow the text of many different styles of music for 15 minutes a day.
February is "It's The Blues Baby" month. It's time cause hearts and souls go together.
If you want to introduce text, vocabulary, metaphor and have motivation going for you...music will push you there. My class likes Fishing Blues. Do you know it? Goes like this:

Fishing Blues
Taj Mahal

Betcha goin fishin all of your time, baby's goin fishing too
Bet your life, your sweet life, catch more fish than you
Many fish bites if ya got good bait
Here's a little tip I would like to relate

Big fish bites if ya got a good bait
I 'a goin fishin
Yes I'm goin fishin
And my baby's goin fishin too.

I went down to my favorite fishin hole
Baby grabbed me a pole and line
Throw my pole on in
Caught a nine pound catfish
now i brought him on home for supper time.

Chorus

Baby brother nout to run me outa my mind
Say can i go fishin wit you?
I took him on down to the fishin hole
now what do you think he did do?
Pülled a great big fish outa the bottom of the pond
And he laughed and jumped cause he was real gone.

Chorus

Put em in the pot baby, put em in the pan
Honey cook em til they're nice and brown
Make a batch of buttermilk coal cakes mama
And you chew them things
And you chomp em on down

Chorus

Betcha goin fishin all of your time, baby's goin fishing too
Bet your life, your sweet life, catch more fish than you
Many fish bites if ya got good bait
Here's a little tip i would like to relate.

Well,

This one is always a part of my 1st grade because years ago when I taught in LA in South Central, and tried to recover from days surviving teaching,I had fun going to see people like Taj Mahal when we ran around LA and got to know the city.
Eventually the musician/artist turned teacher who became my husband and I worked with a young teacher Andrew Cary. He worked nights at a club, and got us in to see Taj Mahal, twice. That was cool. And I started collecting Blues tunes to sing at school.Early on teaching I found sound.
You have to be a bit careful with the Blues because they say things on many levels, so tune choice and what is being said...gotta watch. I'd put on Muddy Waters in a heart beat, thinking of The Stones , but I'd watch which I picked for school. Today people want reasons. I'd approach this historically. So today looking around on the web I found a great place to go for lesson plans.
This was BY FAR my FAVORITE BLUES Site.
You just have to go there and read.

This PBS collection can start you off just right for lessons.












This seemed like a good lesson thinking link:

Learning the Blues

Lesson 2: Langston Hughes and the Blues


But since I'm linking to music I found these lessons developed by The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...and I really like them. I've used several and adapted them. You just might like these and though they aren't all the blues............ about half or more owe their roots there.

• Lesson 1: Keep on Pushing: Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement


• Lesson 2: Langston Hughes and the Blues


• Lesson 3: Fifties/Sixties Musical Playwriting Workshop


• Lesson 4: The Vietnam War: A Popular Music Approach


• Lesson 5: Rockin’ the World: Rock and Roll and Social Protest in 20th Century America


• Lesson 6: Pink Floyd and the Carpe Diem Theme


• Lesson 7: Using Rock to Teach Literary Devices: Jimi Hendrix “The Wind Cries Mary”


• Lesson 8: Using Rock as Primary Source Material: Country Joe McDonald and the Fish “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag”


• Lesson 9: Woody Guthrie and The Grapes of Wrath


• Lesson 10: Words/Music/Images: Interpretation and Meaning A Motivational Activity


• Lesson 11: The Cigar Box Guitar


• Lesson 12: The American Dream


• Lesson 13: Marching to the Beat of a Different Drum


• Lesson 14: Who Rocks Your World?


• Lesson 15: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone: The Changing American Landscape


• Lesson 16: Mending Walls: Barriers in Communications A Model Interdisciplinary Thematic Unit


• Lesson 17: A Modest Proposal: Irony Made Understandable With Rock and Roll


• Lesson 18: From Mark Twain to David Bowie: The Artistic Persona vs. The Individual


• Lesson 19: Runaway Slaves


• Lesson 20: Slices of American Pie: The 1960s Through Music


• Lesson 21: Empathy and the Vietnam War


• Lesson 22: And We Were All in One Place: Youth Culture and the Rock Festival


• Lesson 23: Break on Through: The Poetry of Jim Morrison


• Lesson 24: Warhol’s Foxy Lady: Pop Art


• Lesson 25: Vietnam Revisited


• Lesson 26: Individuality Vs. Social Responsibility: From Camus to the Cure


• Lesson 27: I Went to the Crossroads: The Faust Theme in Music, Film and Literature


• Lesson 28: The Electronic Hearth


• Lesson 29: Know Thyself: Reflections of the Adolescent Identity Crisis in Rock and Roll


• Lesson 30: Trouble for the United States in the Middle East: The Reagan-Bush Years


• Lesson 31: Syncopation and Rhythm in Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Rap Music


• Lesson 32: The John Travolta Syndrome The Influence of Music and Film on Contemporary Fashion and Costume History


• Lesson 33: 8-Rap


• Lesson 34: “And Still I Rise” Proud Black Women: Understanding the poetry of Maya Angelou through the lyrics of two female rappers.


• Lesson 35: The Melting of the Cold War


• Lesson 36: Using Cross-Genre Comparisons to Find the Message in Hip-Hop


• Lesson 37: Teaching “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” with Popular Music


• Lesson 38: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, The Minstrels


• Lesson 39: People Everyday: Introduction to Literary Analysis and Music Literacy


• Lesson 40: Rock and Poetry: A Thematic Project


• Lesson 41: Teaching Economics with Rock and Roll: Unemployment


• Lesson 42: The Bill of Rights is a-Rockin’


• Lesson 43: Screening Coleridge’s Fantasies: Using Popular Music as a Bridge to Literary Intepretation and Criticism


• Lesson 44: Compositional Techniques: Are There Similarities Between


• Lesson 45: Democracy...Not Yet!


• Lesson 46: Feminism Does Not Have to Be an


• Lesson 47: GET UP, STAND UP: Fighting for Rights Around the World


• Lesson 48: Getting Inside The Outsiders Through Music


• Lesson 49: Timbre: Identifying the Tone Color of the Saxophone


• Lesson 50: Using Music to Teach Personal Narrative: “Snapshots” and “Crossing-the-Border” Songs


• Lesson 51: Song Form: From the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Andrea Bocelli


• Lesson 52: Scops, Rappers and You: Historians with Style!

I'm going to go listen to some Muddy Waters.
Just for Valentine's Day I'm playing my favorites.
sarah