New Worship Songs Added!

1920s

Read the intro to the 1920s. Let's start to get a sense of what it was like to live in those times, 100 years ago! Your great grandparents were young and vibrant. I have a picture of my grandmother in a flapper dress like these, and she was wearing an identical hat!

Didn't find the exact pic I was looking for, but this one will do. My grandmother is on the right. The picture is from 1927. She's about 15 or 16 in the photo. By the 1920s, Henry Ford had "put a car in every driveway." Before this, how did people get to church on Sunday? You can address this on our discussion on Google Classroom.

Can you believe before 1920 women were not allowed to vote in elections!

Just wanted to show you how "beautiful" the contestants were for the first Miss America Beauty Pageant. Remember, in 1921 they were in style. This may seem strange, but 20 years from now, the clothes you think are cool and you feel comfortable in will be made fun of by a younger generation of kids. I gotta laugh with you though on this one. They look goofy, especially the girl on the far left.

Just read the paragraph entitled "Deadeye." Last year, in our Spring Musical, Paul Vo and Ginelle Guerrero sang the duet Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better which is from the musical Annie, Get Your Gun. That musical is about the real life sharpshooter Annie Oakley.

Just read the first paragraph about Bessie Smith. This was a "watershed moment" in music history...the first person to record a blues song! I will include a link to one of her songs so you can hear the quality of her voice.

Notice her stylish hat as she sings St. Louis Blues.

This decade was called the "Roaring 20s" for a reason. The year 1920 was another "watershed moment" in history. In the early 1900s, most people in the country were poor and struggling. The majority of people lived on farms and had very few nice things. The U.S. was involved in World War I, which was called The Great War. But in the early 1920s, things changed. When someone goes through a difficult time and somehow gets out from under it, the natural tendency is to relax. That's what America did. WWI was over with, so "let's party!" The 1920s was one big party. Henry Ford's promise to put a car in every driveway started becoming a reality. The stock market started to play a bigger role in American life. Many people became rich overnight by investing a little money in the stock market. All of a sudden, people were producing and buying all kinds of things to make home life easier and more modern, such as washing machines, ironing boards, toaster ovens and other new appliances. In the year 1920, the census showed that for the first time, more people lived in cities than on farms in the U.S. We became a modern society in a short amount of time. There were no TVs yet, so families sat around the radio to listen to music and shows. People starting going out on the town and joined in the latest dance craze, the Charleston!

Read the first two paragraphs on this page. Pay particular attention to the first one regarding George Gershwin. I will post a link to this song. Some of you may recognize it. This was a huge "watershed moment" in music history. Remember I said that nothing happens overnight, that all things develop over time. Here is a perfect example. People had been enjoying Classical Music for ages. Many rejected the "new" Jazz genre of music. What better way to make something acceptable than by combining it with something already established? In one song, Gershwin combined the Classical style of music with Jazz chords throughout. It was a huge hit and established Jazz as an acceptable form of popular music in the U.S. Take a listen.

You don't have to listen to the entire thing, but I would recommend it. It's a beautiful piece and typical of a large Classical composition. It's 17 minutes long!

If you do listen to it all...dear God...the 11:30 mark when the strings come back in with the secondary theme...it's astonishingly beautiful!

If you loved Winnie the Pooh growing up, here's your start for it, 1925. On the right side, read about the Charleston dance and the dog who served a prison term! Here is a video clip of a group doing the dance. It's from a 1950s movie about the 1920s. Enjoy!

As a Catholic and Christian, the paragraph about the Monkey Trial should irritate you. The right side won, but the trial brought infamous notoriety to Darwinism which led to the current secular, Godless society's views of evolution. As Catholic Christians, we believe that God created the heavens and the earth, and all the living things in it. If we were meeting face-to-face, this would be a hot topic. Not sure we could do it justice in an On-Line debate. If you want to bring it up on the discussion board, you may! Remember to be kind to one another! :)

That's enough for today. We got about halfway through the 20s. Read the pages. Listen to the music. At some point, probably not this week, I'll put a quiz up on the history of music by decade. The history will likely be the most time-consuming days. Hope you enjoy it! Your comment (s) on the discussion board on Google Classroom will be your participation grade for the first half of the 1920s. If you post something moderately intelligent, you'll receive a 100. Let us hear from you! Hope you and your family are staying healthy!!!

Friday, 3-27-20

One thing I want to touch on from the 1920s that our little book fails to mention, surprisingly, is the development / breakthroughs in the film industry. Up through about the mid-twenties, movies were silent. In 1926-27, Talkies were developed. Fox and Warner Brothers made use of a device called the Vitaphone, which allowed sound recorded on a disc to be synchronized with the otherwise silent film. Early attempts had major issues, as you might expect. I'm going to share two or three clips to show you the development:

Silent ---> 2. Talkies ---> 3. Movies with sound on the actual film

Silent Film --- Buster Keaton stars in this comedy. This clip is about 4 minutes long. Look for the scene where the road workers all dig and toss dirt right when Buster is cycling by.

2. Talkie --- Al Jolson stars in The Jazz Singer. In this scene, he sings Blue Skies to his mother. The way he talks to his mother is a little weird, but this was literally the very first full-length film that had people talking in it (the clip is only 2:35), so I wanted you to see a segment of it. The sound sync in the clip is perfect, but back when it was shown in the theaters, the timing wasn't always right. The mouth movements were off from the audio part of the time.

3. Movie with sound on film --- This clip is from the very famous (at the time) Thin Man movie series. They were so popular there were 5 or 6 sequels made over a 10 year period. Nick and Nora Charles are detectives and are always solving murder cases. The shows have drama, but are also comedies. This is an example of a high-quality sound film made early on, with good production and acting. The film pauses for a few seconds towards the end...whoever posted on YouTube did that on purpose for some reason...just let it roll to see the end. This is the end of movie #2, the best of the series. It also stars a young Jimmy Stewart (It's a Wonderful Life Christmas classic).

Tuesday, 3-31-20 ... and Wednesday, 4-1-20

Take two days for this assignment. Let's finish the 1920s! Same deal...READ MY COMMENTS FIRST. That will tell you what to pay attention to on the scanned page. I'm sharing basically three types of info: (1) things that are interesting just for fun, (2) things that are historically significant that could possibly be on a quiz, and (3) things that are musically significant that will definitely be on the quiz. If there is a paragraph on the scanned page and I don't mention it, then you don't have to worry about it. If you haven't taken a look at the three video clips right above this on the page, do so now. It is the development of film in the 1920s. The info is fair game on a quiz. On these last pages from the 20s, there is not a lot of mention about music in particular, but keep in mind, one of our main objectives in this part of our class is to be aware of what was going on in the world as music is developing. The 20s were wild and raucous, full of brave souls like Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, Robert Goddard and all those who risked everything in the stock market. The styles of clothing were daring. The wild, cutting-edge jazz music and dancing of the age was reflective of world and national events.

Read the paragraph about Robert Goddard. There is a Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA here in Houston.

Charles Lindbergh

If you want to see it instead of just read about it, here it is...worth a look. It's only about 6 min.

Not to be outdone, Amelia Earhart was the first female passenger to cross the Atlantic. It's ironic that she boasted how safe flying was, but she lost her life that way.

Also, read the short paragraph on the presidential election.

Here is some nice never-seen-before footage of Amelia right before her takeoff of the flight in which her plane was lost. (4 min.)

Just wanted you to see that John F. Kennedy was a boy scout long before he was president of course! Unlikely to be on any quiz.

Appropriately, the first movie to win an Oscar was Wings. See how entertainment and music can reflect the times? Think of heroes Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.

Then, of course, the crowning historical event of the 1920s...the Stock Market Crash. I'll try to find a good, short video clip + I've got 2 or 3 interesting pictures, including one man willing to sell his brand new Rolls Royce for $100 so he can feed his family.

This clip is only 1 min 12 sec long. For a really good look at the Stock Market Crash, take a look at the next clip. Since it's a little longer, I'll just go ahead and give you guys two days for this assignment instead of one.

Still fairly short (9 min), this is a much better look at the Crash and how it affected the lives of those who lost everything. One statement in the film I disagree with, though, was when the narrator states that the Stock Market Crash had nothing to do with the Great Depression. It was such a monumental event that forever changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, maybe millions, and their financial welfare, it had to have a huge effect on the economy. Millionaires one day became penniless the next. That means they couldn't go spend any money, which directly influenced the economy. We will explore the Great Depression in the next decade study, and there were several other factors, but it had to be influenced by the initial market problems.

Tried to find a Houston Chronicle or Dallas Morning News headline but couldn't find any on line.

Stock brokers taking a look at the readouts on that fateful day.

$100 dollars for a Rolls Royce was a steal, even 100 years ago. Poor guy wanted to feed his family, though...can't blame him. That car today, if in mint condition, would probably fetch a few hundred thousand dollars, if not a million.

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