Complete the exercises below.
1. In his 1955 article “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” Muddy Waters says that when he first started playing in Chicago, people called his songs “sharecropper music.”
Answer the question below:
How did the sharecropping economy in the southern United States function, and how did the system keep sharecroppers stuck in a cycle of poverty?
2. Study the lyrics to Muddy Waters’ “Burr Clover Farm Blues.” Muddy Waters recorded this song in 1941, when he was living on a Mississippi farm and working as a sharecropper. Muddy was recorded by Alan Lomax and John Work, two musicologists working for Fisk University and the Library of Congress to study the folk traditions in rural communities. Muddy Waters left the farm and moved to Chicago in 1943, two years after recording this song.
Answer the questions below:
- According to the lyrics, what seem to be the singer’s feelings about the possibility of leaving the farm? How do the lyrics convey the singer’s sense of “displacement”?
- Why might some audiences have identified this sound as “sharecropper music”? How do you visualize the setting for a song such as “Burr Clover Farm Blues”?
- What are your first impressions of the photograph on the left? How many people do you see, and how would you describe the way they look in this photo? What relationship do you think these people might have to each other?
- What are your first impressions of the photograph on the right? How would you describe the size of the house?
- Notice the proximity between the house and the cotton pile. What might this proximity suggest about the relationship between work and home life for someone working as a sharecropper? How much leisure time do you think a sharecropper living in this cabin had?
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