The Blues

- Howlin’ Wolf’s “I’ll Be Back Some Day”

*Road Trip Handouts

- Song Lyrics

- Map and directions for planning

- Road Trip Artifacts

- Information about Share Cropping

- Final Presentation Directions

-Presentation Rubric

-Speaking Rubric

Station 1: Yazoo City in the Mississippi Delta. Poor southerners, black and white alike, lived in the shadow of natural disaster. Students will examine songs, paintings, and imagery to learn about the floods, pestilence, and drought that threatened the lives of southern field workers. The resources for this station are:

• Video: Bessie Smith, “Homeless Blues” (1927)
• Video: Charley Patton, “Bo Weavil Blues” (1929)
• Video: Son House, "Death Letter Blues" (1968)
• Images: Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series, Panel 9
• Images: Photo of destruction from the 1927 Mississippi River flood

Station 2: Hillhouse, Mississippi. Even though slavery was abolished after the Civil War, African-American and white tenant farmers lived a life of grinding poverty under the rules of sharecropping. Students will examine texts to learn about this economic system. The resources for this station are:

• Video: Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Cotton” (1959)
• Handout: Explanation of Sharecropping (from PBS, "Sharecropping in Mississippi")
• Images: Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series, Panel 17
• Images: Dorothea Lange, Photographs of Sharecroppers (c. 1937)
  • Cotton sharecroppers. Greene County, Georgia, 1937
  • Poor mother and children, California, 1936
  • Sharecropper's cabin and sharecropper's wife, ten miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, 1937
  • Thirteen-year old sharecropper boy near Americus, Georgia, 1937