Black Freedom Struggle
MUS 360/CRES 359/HIS 390 with Prof. Mark Burford explores how music has articulated the struggle for Black Freedom from Reconstruction to World War II.
Black Freedom Struggle is a highly unique class being cross listed across three different categories, drawing students from the Music, History, CRES, and many other disciplines. As Prof. Burford explains, “The cross listing of “Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865–1945” in Music, History, and CRES communicates what I most enjoy about teaching the course: the necessity of taking sound, race, and the historical record into account when studying this material. More than anything, I am inspired by the challenge of sparking Reed student interest in African American history, at a time when our understanding of the past is more essential than ever.”
In this course Prof. Burford and his students will examine, how over the course of the ongoing civil rights movement—a Black freedom struggle that dates to Reconstruction—music has continuously marked terrain upon which U.S. citizens have conceptualized, articulated, and negotiated the terms of an equitable society. Through close study of primary and secondary historical texts and musical repertory that includes the spiritual, ragtime, blues, jazz, anthems, and concert music, this course explores how African Americans have mobilized music—as sound, as performance, and as material culture—to articulate the stakes and meanings of freedom, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II. In particular, the course illuminates the symbolism and politics of genre, the strategic constructions of authenticity, and the moral of stories we tell about Black music during this period.
Prof. Burford is R. P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at ÐÓ°ÉÊÓƵ. As a music historian, his scholarship and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American music and long- nineteenth-century European concert music. His published writing for both academic and general audiences includes articles and essays on Sam Cooke, Johannes Brahms, Alvin Ailey, gospel music, and opera. He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field and editor of The Mahalia Jackson Reader. In 2022, he was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association for outstanding contribution to the field of musicology. His current research project is a book on W. E. B. Du Bois and music, focusing on coverage of music in the NAACP magazine The Crisis during Du Bois’s twenty-three-year editorship.
Readings from the course include:
- Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race
- Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow.
- James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Boston:
- May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem
- Susan Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin
- Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
Listenings from the course include:
- Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, “A Corn Song” (1897)
- Scott Joplin “Please Say You Will” (1895; performed by Richard Zimmerman)
- Fisk Jubilee Singers, “Done What You Tole Me To Do” (1911)
- Ma Rainey “Moonshine Blues” (1924)
- Bessie Smith “Gulf Coast Blues” (1923)
Tags: Academics, Courses We’d Love To Take, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, Professors