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Adam's Blues Course…
Adam Gussow, half of the duo "Satan and Adam" and author of "Mister Satan's
Apprentice: A Blues Memoir", is teaching a blues course in New York
Says Adam:
If you're a New York-area blues music fan looking to broaden your horizons, you
may be interested in a course I'm teaching at the New School (66 W. 12th St.,
NYC) this fall, beginning September 27th. (Some of you know me as the
harmonica-playing half of the blues duo "Satan and Adam" and the
author of MISTER SATAN'S APPRENTICE: A BLUES MEMOIR.) The course description
reads as follows:
Juke-Joint Witness: The Blues Tradition in American Literature (course # 0699)
Taking shape as a black Southern folk-form at the dawn of the Twentieth
Century, wringing lyric euphoria from despair, blues music has moved outward
from the juke-joints and into the heart of American culture during the past one
hundred years, crossing the color-line that initially helped provoke its
emergence. But blues song and blues performance have been shadowed from the
start by an equally vital literary response: novels, poems, plays, and memoirs
that bear witness to the harsh lives, earthy pleasures, and transformative
yearnings of blues-makers and their audiences. Using musical examples, live and
recorded, as primary evidence, we'll explore blues texts by writers such as
W.C. Handy, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, August Wilson, Mezz Mezzrow,
Langston Hughes, David Honeyboy Edwards, Arthur Flowers, Walter Mosley, and
Bebe Moore Campbell. How does blues literature translate the bittersweet
tonality and gutbucket rhythms of the music it presumes to speak for? In what
ways are blues texts marked by lynching and other forms of racial violence that
scarred the early New South? We'll read these texts in all their hybrid glory,
as migration narratives surcharged with Afro-modernist lyricism; as heated
dialogues between men and women, literacy and orality, black and white.
What I couldn't say in the course description--and what I hope you'll keep in
mind--is that this class is going to be unlike any other literature class
you've ever taken. The New School is a continuing ed institution; if you're not
taking the class for credit, you don't have to write papers or take final
exams. What you do have to do--or should I say, GET to do--is read a series of
incredibly interesting blues books (raw, violent, sexy, deep, lyrical books)
and come to class once a week (1 hor. and 45 minutes, Monday nights, down in
the Village) and listen to the blues recordings I'll bring in (Mamie Smith to
Muddy Waters to Marcia Ball to Kenny Neal) and the occasional riffs I'll blow
on harp (by way of explanation of what, for example, the "blue" third
is). And you'll have to come prepared to jam--i.e., talk, argue, learn from
your fellow blues aficionados, and above all challenge and deepen your evolving
sense of what this marvellous thing called "blues literature" is
about.
If you play blues guitar, so much the better: you're drafted, on occasion, to
show the class what blues guitar sounds like. We will also probably take a
couple of class trips--after class, I mean--to local blues clubs.
This is not, in other words, the literature class that bored you to tears back
in college. This is whatever the opposite of that class was. I guarantee that
some or all of the books we'll read will tangle with your heart and guts in
exactly the same way as the blues music you love.
If you're interested in registering, please call the New School: 212-229-5960.
Again, the course is #0699 and is listed as "Juke Joint Witness: The Blues
Tradition in American Literature."
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