documentary inspires teaching (and vice versa)

This memoir helps paints the beatnik scene.

I also appreciate how much Tupac's work serves as an archive.

One of the real joys experienced while seeing this documentary to completion has been observing how much my interest in Grant Green's life, not just his music, overlaps with my teaching and research at the University of Alabama. I am presently thinking through the components of an HY 430  course for next semester tentatively titled "From Bebop to Hip Hop: Young America and Music." It is an undergraduate seminar so the course is mostly geared toward the students writing a research paper. One of their most essentials tasks will be using an archive - perhaps sheet lyrics in the UA's Hoole Special Collections - that will help them sort through how young people exert some measure of control over their lives via music, performing it or listening to it. There will be an effort to be inclusive, which is to say see the issue from all political and social perspectives.

Because the course has to be pitched at the right level, in order to bring in some of the concerns of young people in the late 1950s and 1960s through the 1970s through the present day, I am thinking of assigning a memoir I read as a young woman on the life of Hettie Jones, former wife of Amari Baraka and a book a poems by Tupac Shakur.

Right away, they will have some sources permitting them to sense what was happening in the backdrop of a lot of the music to which some of them listen today (indeed, music samples of music from this fertile moment of  recording: the 1950s and 1960s will figure in).

Along the way, they will have shorter readings uncovering more information about specific music genres as well as on-the-ground social developments like the black freedom struggle, the beatnik period, the arrival of bebop, Motown, and yes, hip hop. Postwar wealth, urban changes and rising conservative climate in America as well grassroots movements of more recent years will also be topics on which to focus. I look forward to working with this new group of students.

As I continue finishing this film, it will also be great to see Grant's life inside of certain historical developments. As mentioned earlier on this blog, as a young African American man, he performed alongside white musicians in the short-lived St. Louis beatnik club The Holy Barbarian in 1959, upsetting many. His 1965 recording "The Selma March," which was part of National Public Radio (NPR) Civil Rights playlist five years ago, and 1969 "Cease the Bombing" speak to the issues of the time.

He was a resident of St. Louis' Mill Creek community, a target of urban renewal/"black folks removal," as the late Sylvia Shabazz, Grant's childhood friend, once said. All this as Gaslight Square, a strip of nightclubs on Olive Street, some in which he performed, flourished from the early 1950s through the mid-1960s. He went on to live in New York and Detroit where he died in 1979. Not unlike many musicians and artists, he lived so much of the music he recorded. Try listening to Kendrick Lamar's "Sing About Me," which samples Grant's "Maybe Tomorrow," and not hear the tragic timelessness, but also specific histories, in the music of many people, including young America.