Rejected NEH Admission Essay (Later Accepted)

In 2002 I attended a symposium at the University of Kansas celebrating the centennial of poet Langston Hughes’ birth. While I have to admit that I was excited to see Kevin Powell because of his stint on MTV’s Real World, and the reading by Paule Marshall at a local bookstore was a highlight, it was a lecture by Amiri Baraka that heralded my sixteen year fascination with the blues. I had just begun teaching a few years earlier, and my knowledge of Langston Hughes consisted primarily of The Negro Speaks of Rivers and Mother to Son, but Baraka introduced me to Hughes’ twelve-bar blues. That same year I took began recording a spoken word CD.Students would write poetry, and we would go to a studio owned by a former student to professionally record and mix the tracks. I have shared examples and modeled “blues poetry” that year and every year since, but I have never been able to find the hook. I want to use the knowledge I gain from this conference to find new avenues to lead my students to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the poetry of the delta.

For a long time the blues was a personal obsession. I would annoy my wife and son on road trips listening to Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, and a seventeen minute version of “Tobacco Road” by Edgar Winter. I insisted that we stand front and center on the hard packed dirt of a rodeo arena in ninety-five degree heat to see Leo “Bud” Welch at the Pilgrimage Festival in Nashville. At the Beale Street Music Festival, I made a beeline to the blues tent, and later that night, we jammed ourselves against the railing to see the headliner, Jack White. Arriving earlier than usual to LouFest, a local music festival, I made sure that the whole family enjoyed Buddy Guy’s set. We have stood in line in the French Quarter to hear the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, forced our son to take our picture at the Tallahatchie Bridge, visited the Woody Guthrie Center and paid our respects at Robert Johnson’s grave, but until this last school year I had not been able to successfully incorporate this love of music into my classroom.

Over the summer I went to a workshop sponsored by Teachrock.org. It was held at a local casino, and to be honest I thought it was going to be terrible, but I knew that after we listened to their speil, we would gain free admission to the Little Steven concert that night. The presentation was only a half hour tour of their website, but it is the mother lode of music related lesson plans. The very first thing I did after the concert was to type the word “blues” into the search bar and found a lesson entitled The Blues And The Great Migration. I eventually adapted this in to a project based lesson called “Red, White & The Blues” in which students read Fences by August Wilson through a musical lens, studied the local St. Louis crime ballads “Stagger Lee”, “Frankie & Johnny” and “Duncan and Brady,” and created presentations with a soundtrack for an era in African-American history. My research for this unit brought me full circle to Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and his book Blues People: Negro Music in White America and led me to a deeper understanding blues history of St. Louis, but I feel that I have only scratched the surface.

W.C. Handy wrote the song “St. Louis Blues” in 1914, yet the title of the song is more widely known as the name of the city’s NHL franchise. One hundred and two years after it was composed we became home of the National Blues Museum, and that, for most people, is the sum total of St. Louis’ connection to the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta. Residents embrace their connection to western expansion with a mid-century monument, constantly remind visitors of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and name libraries and grade schools across the region after Lewis and Clark. Route 66 is celebrated with signs and historic businesses, while Hwy 61 is virtually ignored. The city celebrates its version of Italian cuisine while ignoring soul food and Delta delicacies. Whether conscious or not, St. Louis distances itself from its southern roots, denies the influence of the great migration, and buries the history of many of its people. By attending “The Most Southern Place On Earth” workshop, I hope to reconnect my students with their community’s through music, food, and past to empower them participate in its future.