As is obvious to any fan of modern music, chord progression can’t be copyrighted. Today in class we were shown Axis of Awesome’s song Four Chords. I’m familiar with both and think the former is a very talented comedy band and the latter a legitimately creative song.

From there the topic changed to something much darker. I’ve always kind of known that Jim Crow was a kind of black cultural character and that’s where the term Jim Crow era derived, but it never connected to me that he was a minstrel show character. I agree with Professor O’Malley that that is very strange and I’m curious to learn more about that aspect. From there we were shown lynching postcards, a thing I never before knew existed. Something so macabre and so brutal publicized so widely seems so alien, even from what we’re taught about the post-war south. And it also made me realized that as much as students are taught about segregation and racial violence, we’re rarely if ever shown photos. I was never shown lynching photos in class prior to college; known in school text books either. It’s one thing to mentally know that over 4,000 blacks were lynched in the century after the Civil War. It’s a wholly other emotional realization to see it.

From there we listened to black artists like Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters, along with different versions of the song Darktown Strutters Ball (I liked the modern version the best). We were left considering the arbitrariness of “authenticity” and how when analyized deeply enough it’s hard to place where some songs fit and how they don’t comport to our previously recognized categories.