This class I found very interesting.  It posed the question in this post title.  What do we actually know about historical narratives?  How do we know what was actually true and what wasn’t?  And this more or less links back to the earlier class analogy of Dale Earnhardt’s car and museum presentations of history.

To refine, the subject brought up in terms of this question was concerning African and African-American music, and this makes sense because the class focused I feel primarily on the relations between African Americans, racism relations in the south, and American musical identity.  How do we know what African music from the 19th and 20th century was?  Do we only really see what white music producers saw as “music?”  Or is “African music” what was enjoyed and thought of as appropriate expressions of “black suffering” by white consumers what is historically presented as this genre?

I think that this genre of music is primarily influenced by the environments that it was sung, created, or “grew” in.  I think that it is really difficult for anyone to assign a definite source or starting point for the origins of a genre, it just mutates and mashes from whatever feelings or happenstances that artist/workman/housewife/random kid on a street corner/and so on was feeling or experiencing at that point in time.  Or, if a certain beat or tempo, and thus lyrics, came about as a tune to match the swing of a hammer or other practice, because, as I have learned in this course and from previous knowledge, “worker’s tunes” often made the genre leap to urban centers and stages.

This has been a very interesting and educational course, and attempted to deal with some pretty unpleasant parts of American history in an informative way, to learn from how those terrible conditions led to some of the modern societal aspects today.  (I wish everyone shared this approach, like someone who sat behind me sometimes would take to angrily or bemusedly muttering every time a racial issue were brought up in the class – which was often)