10/17/2018
In Henry Thomas’ song “Railroadin’ Some”, you can hear this song and almost immediately tell that it can be classified as a “country song”. Why is that? Because it “sounds country?” This reason has always made both the most and least amount of sense to me, yet I am willing to accept it ignorantly as a sufficient answer. But there is always something similar between a lot of the music I listen too. It all sounds somewhat “the same”, except if I am listening to music from around different parts of the world. I have come to learn from my experience both playing and studying music in high school that the common I IV V I chord progression has made its way into most popular music, and therefore gives a similar voice to songs that, from a distance, seem completely different.
Country music almost sounds handmade, and that is due to the instrumentation and often repeated chord progressions and timbre that has become associated with country music to modern listeners. “The human brain (…) operates by association (…) With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. ” (Bush P.14). Often, we hear country music and think of “the south”. We picture a farm or a cowboy or plaid patterns everywhere. But what we don’t consider is the history that lies behind all of these stereotypes. As we have learned earlier in the course, all music is saturated in politics and history, and often the history that lies behind most popular music is forgotten or pushed to the side. The fact that Christian hymns are laced with traces of Hawaiian music is just one example of this. Although this is a sad fact, that many times the history of a genre of music is overlooked, it does not take away from the fact that, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, there is a certain interconnectedness to information and music that no amount of ignorance can take away.
10/22/2018
The debate over the true cause of the Civil War has always been an interesting one. Many believe it was solely because of racism, or solely because of slavery. From what I have learned (and I am aware that there is a lot I still do not know) I believe it was largely caused by the pride of slave owners and dedication to protecting their way of life that fueled the fire of that war. It was not slavery alone, it was not the white man thinking he was superior to the black man alone. It was the need for slaveholders to continue to live the way they had been, and by any means protect their lifestyle up to that point. After the Civil War had ended, the country as a whole largely failed at mending the seam between the north and south. As commented by one of our classmates, there was little effort put in to welcome the south back into the Union. They were seen as having “lost” the war. This is reflected in the simple fact that we still refer to those states as “the south”.
A great deal of propaganda that comes from the time of the Civil War was posed, or faked in pursuit of painting the war in one light or another.