Teaching the history of 20th century American popular music

In the fall, I’m teaching a new music history class at NYU on 20th century American popular music. This is not a history of rock. When the department says “20th century”, they mean the entire 20th century. We don’t get to Elvis until after the midterm.

The most difficult part is going to be the beginning, because I regret to tell you that for the first several decades of the twentieth century, the most popular form of entertainment in the US was blackface minstrelry. Let me give you an idea of how big a deal it was. When Warner Brothers wanted to make their first feature film with sound, they needed a guaranteed box-office smash to mitigate the risk of this new and unproven technology. This is why they went with a lightly fictionalized biography of Al Jolson: evidently, nothing sold movie tickets in the 1920s more reliably than a white guy singing in blackface.

Minstrelry is going to be a fraught topic for everyone, but we need to do it, and not just as a historical matter. Matthew Morrison argues that blackface never ended, it just got a little more subtle. He coined the term “Blacksound” to describe the way that white artists continue to imitate the sound and style of Black music, even if they don’t literally paint their faces anymore. I don’t even know if it’s even possible for a white person to succeed in the commercial mainstream without doing Blacksound! So we will definitely be reading and talking about Morrison’s book.

Other musics from the early 20th century are less problematic, but are probably unfamiliar: brass bands, ragtime, light opera, and ethnically stereotypical vaudeville songs like “Yes! We Have No Bananas.”

I imagine that the kids will be able to connect to Scott Joplin, but otherwise this material will feel remote. My preferred approach to this era is to think of it all as jazz prehistory. It’s fascinating to hear the original versions of tunes that we now know as jazz standards. If you associate “All of Me” with Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra, it’s a startling experience to hear it sung by Ruth Etting.

Once we get to jazz proper, then I am solidly within my stylistic comfort zone and knowledge base, and engaging the students will be easier too. Even if they haven’t heard Duke Ellington or Count Basie before, I expect that everyone will connect to this music eagerly.

We will certainly talk about the blues too, but I want to challenge the narrative that blues gave rise to rock. Contrary to what the Rolling Stones or Eric Clapton would have you believe, rock emerged out of piano-based R&B, jump blues, Western swing and hillbilly boogie. Andrew Hickey chronicles these styles well in the first fifteen episodes of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and I plan to draw on his examples. It’s going to be enlightening to trace the lineage from “Ida Red” by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys to “Maybelline” by Chuck Berry.

I also want to set up the idea that rock as we know it is really just country played too fast, R&B played too fast, and then from the late 1960s onwards, folk and blues played too fast.

One unsolved problem I’m thinking about: how do I convey the material reality of everyday life for people in the early part of the 20th century? How do I get NYU students to imagine a world without cars, electricity, indoor plumbing, vaccines, global communications or voting rights for women and Black people? The second half of the class is easier because we have a lot of movies and TV set in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, but what about the 10s or 20s? The Gilded Age and the Great Gatsby are helpful to a point, but only to a point. I’m open to suggestions on this.

As interesting as it is for me to plan out the listening examples, readings and writing projects, the big challenge is going to be: how do you get the kids to do the reading and write the papers without just falling back on ChatGPT? I am going to impose a strict AI ban, but I don’t want to have to be a cop. Ideally, I can create assignments that the kids won’t want to use AI to get around in the first place.

My friend Deb Chachra, approximately the smartest person I have ever met, eagerly volunteered to talk me through this problem, and she helped me arrive at what I think is an elegant solution. Deb centers her own teaching philosophy on studies of motivation like Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Using extrinsic rewards or threats can get you compliance, but the kind of learning that lasts has to be motivated from within. You can foster this motivation by giving students a goal that they are personally invested in attaining, that is challenging but not impossible to attain, and that they can approach with autonomy. Along the way, students need to understand why they are doing what they’re doing. If I assign a bunch of papers and reading responses that will only be read by me, then kids’ only motivation to do a good job is either my personal charm or fear of reprisal. Instead, I want them to write for each other, and for the general public.

This is why my plan is to have the class assemble a public-facing annotated playlist of key songs from across the 20th century. For the midterm, we’ll do entries from 1900 to 1950, and for the final, we’ll do entries from 1950 to 2000. Drawing on the model of the 500 Songs podcast, each student will choose a song that is emblematic of a particular style, era, or historical turning point. They will write a capsule bio of the artist, a musicological analysis of the song, and a discussion of its context: what was happening socially when it was released, what songs influenced it, and what songs it influenced in turn. I especially want the students to be alert to mythology, so, no talking about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads unless they are critiquing that story on the meta level.

I want everything backed up by credible sources, and that means the kids need to learn what a credible source is. I’ll take them through some of my own research, and talk about why I chose the references that I did and why I rejected others. I want them to understand how academic peer review works and why it makes for trustworthy journal articles (though it has its limits too.) I want them to know about Reviewer 2. I want them to know that, contrary to what you might expect, books are less reliable than articles, because they can’t be peer reviewed as rigorously. I want them to learn how to cite, and why they need to be fastidious about it.

One of Deb’s crucial pieces of wisdom is that you should break down big research projects down into multiple discrete steps, each with their own deadline and relatively low-stakes grade. So for my annotated playlist project, I’m thinking of five separate assignments over five weeks.

1. Pick your song and write what Deb calls a lo-fi prototype: a terrible and unpolished first draft, unconcerned about grammar or spelling. Verbally present it to the class for feedback. We want to assess the basic idea here, not the formatting.
2. Gather sources and write an annotated bibliography.
3. Write an outline.
4. Present your draft for peer review.
5. Edit your draft for posting on the web site.

This sequence means that we will need to start working on the midterm by the second week of class, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug. If the kids are working toward this project the whole time, then the reading and listening assignments we do along the way are all potentially useful sources for them, and they have an incentive to investigate them actively.

So, that’s the plan. I love teaching a new class, and I solicit as much student feedback as I can get while we’re in progress so I can make adjustments quickly. Unfortunately, this is happening at a dark time in my department and for arts education generally; the budget situation is grim, people are getting their sections cut, the political atmosphere is hostile (not within NYU, but NYU can only insulate us to a point.) I have to run this class in parallel to getting Tuniversity off the ground because I don’t see a viable future for myself in college teaching unless something dramatic happens. So while I hope to get to teach the class many more times, I am also thinking about other uses I can put this work to: writing here, podcasting, teaching privately, who knows what else. I would rather just teach classes and not be hustling! But there is no choice at the moment.