Curriculum / Semester 1 / History
Historical Curriculum
From West Africa to the Delta — the musical lineage behind everything you are practicing. Each unit explains why the techniques exist, not just what they are.
The African Foundation
West African musical architecture, the griot tradition, polyrhythm as interlocking cycles, and what survived the Middle Passage — and why.
- ▸West African pentatonic vs. diatonic
- ▸The griot as keeper of truth
- ▸Polyrhythm and the origin of "feel"
- ▸What the Middle Passage could not destroy
Music Under Enslavement
Work songs, field hollers, and ring shouts — and the exact mechanism by which the blues scale's blue notes were born from the friction of two tonal systems.
- ▸Work songs vs. field hollers — functional music
- ▸Why the blues scale sounds "blue" (the technical answer)
- ▸Ring shout and preserved polyrhythm
- ▸The banjo's African origin and why the guitar replaced it
The Blues Emerges: Form Takes Shape
How the AAB lyrical structure maps exactly onto the 12-bar form, W.C. Handy at the Tutwiler station, Mamie Smith's race record revolution, and the guitar technique that made it all work.
- ▸Post-Emancipation: music becomes personal
- ▸Why 12 bars — the form IS the poem
- ▸W.C. Handy: transcriber, not inventor
- ▸Mamie Smith and the race record revolution
The Delta: The Guitar Speaks Alone
Acoustic constraints that forged Delta technique, the Dockery Plantation lineage (Patton → House → Johnson → Waters), Robert Johnson's synthesis, and what the devil myth actually tells us.
- ▸Acoustic constraints → technique solutions
- ▸Charley Patton: the guitar as percussion
- ▸Son House: the holler enters the guitar
- ▸Robert Johnson: synthesis figure
- ▸The Dockery Plantation lineage