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Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 10, Lesson 4: Rock and Roll Goes To the Movies

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In this lesson, students assume the role of entertainment industry professionals responsible for marketing a selection of movies from the early Rock and Roll era. Following an examination of trailers, posters, newspaper articles, and the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, students will present to the class on the various stakeholders that helped shape the way Rock and Roll culture was introduced to mainstream movie audiences in the 1950s.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 1, Lesson 1: How To Study Rock and Roll

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In this lesson we explore one song Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," released on Chess Records in 1958 and suggest several analytical frameworks in which one can deepen one's understanding of the song: using a listening template; using a timeline to understand a song's historical context; understanding Rock and Roll as a visual culture; understanding Rock and Roll as performance; understanding Rock and Roll as a literary form; and understanding the industry and technology of Rock and Roll. Of course, what we do with "Johnny B. Goode" can be done with any song. The objective is to understand a recording in the most complete way possible.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 2, Lesson 1: The Blues: The Sound of Rural Poverty

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This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi. Students will "stop" in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping. They will study a particular Country Blues song at each "stop" and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it. Students will create a scrapbook of their journey, in which they will record and analyze what they have learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 2, Lesson 2: The Blues and the Great Migration

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The repercussions of the Great Migration are far-reaching. Today, much of the restlessness and struggle that the Blues helped to articulate in the Migration era remains central in other forms of American music, including Hip Hop. In this lesson, students look to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as case studies that illustrate why African Americans left the South in record numbers and how communities came together in new urban environments, often around the sound of the Blues.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 3, Lesson 1: the Birth of the Electric Guitar

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In this lesson, students will trace some of the technological developments that made the electric guitar possible. Using a variety of Internet sources, students will conduct research into some of the early models, including the hollow-bodied Gibson ES-150, introduced in 1936, and the Fender Telecaster, the first mass-marketed solid-body electric guitar, introduced in 1952, at the dawn of the Rock and Roll era. They will explore not only how these instruments transformed the Blues sound, but how they laid the groundwork for the development of the electric guitar as an essential Rock and Roll instrument.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 4, Lesson 2: WW II and the Shrinking of the Ensemble.

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This lesson explores the transition from the Big Band era of the 1930s and 40s to the rise of smaller ensembles and featured singers in the years following World War II. Students will analyze and draw conclusions from primary sources including wartime rationing posters, archival photographs, and Billboard chart lists. Video clips featuring the music of Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and other artists provide students with visual and musical evidence to discuss factors that led to the shrinking of popular music ensembles and the emergence of genres that inspired Rock and Roll artists in the 1950s.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 6, Lesson 1: The Musical Roots of Doo Wop

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Doo Wop's musical and social roots point to a long history of vocal harmony in American culture, particularly in African-American communities. Social singing provided entertainment in barbershops, bars, schools, churches, theaters, and other communal spaces. Some of the musical precedents students will consider in this lesson include the barbershop quartets that flourished from the 1890s through World War I; the Pop vocal groups such as the Mills Brothers that topped the charts in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s; and the Gospel singers who made harmonizing a spiritual practice throughout the early twentieth century.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 7, Lesson 1: Chuck Berry

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In this lesson, students will analyze several of the elements that combined to make Berry such an important and influential artist. They will examine his pioneering guitar riffs, his carefully crafted lyrics that spoke directly to the emerging market of white, middle-class teen listeners, his blend of R&B and Country and Western influences, and his energetic performance style, which helped pave the way for a generation of guitar-playing showmen.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 7, Lesson 2: The Rise of the Electric Guitar

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Through a comparative analysis of magazine advertisements, graphs, and statistical data, students will discuss the factors that led to the surge in guitar sales in postwar America. Live performances by Jerry Lee Lewis and the Beatles serve to highlight the role of piano versus that of the electric guitar in defining the look and the sound of the Rock and Roll band.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 7, Lesson 3: Bo Diddley: The Grandfather of Hip Hop?

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In this lesson, students explore the particularities of Bo Diddley's music, contrasting it with other artists of the late 1940s and early 50s, specifically John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen," Chuck Berry's "School Days" and The Chordettes' "Mr. Sandman." Through comparative listening, students will determine elements of Bo Diddley's style, including his emphasis on rhythm and lyrical content, and examine how his recordings compared with the popular music of his peers. In groups, students watch 1980s-era footage of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, engaging in a guided discussion to draw conclusions as to whether they believe Bo Diddley can be viewed as a precursor to Hip Hop.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 8, Lesson 1: Gospel Music: The Birth of Soul

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In this lesson, students will trace the influence of Gospel music on early Rock and Roll, particularly in R&B's embrace of such key musical features as the call-and-response and in the uses of complex rhythms. The class will make side-by-side comparisons of Gospel and early Rock and Roll songs, as well as work in groups to chart the overall influence of Gospel on a range of different popular music genres.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 9, Lesson 1: Radio Before Rock and Roll

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From its birth in 1920 to the rise of television in the early 1950s, commercial radio played a central role in American life. For much of this era, the radio itself held an honored place in the center of the home. Entire families would gather around it to hear important news events, listen to live music, or catch the latest installment of a hit drama or comedy series such as The Lone Ranger or Amos n Andy. But by the early 1950s, technological shifts most notably the introduction of television into the family living room heralded significant changes in the American people's relationship with radio. The rise of smaller, portable radios meant that individuals could now listen virtually any time or place. The growing popularity of television rendered radio drama and comedy series nearly obsolete; listeners were less satisfied with merely listening to stories on radio when they could see them unfold before their eyes on television.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 1, Birth of Rock. Chapter 9, Lesson 2: Rhythm and Blues Hits the Airwaves

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This lesson will focus on two of those DJs: Memphis's Dewey Phillips, whose popular show "Red Hot and Blue" frequently featured music by African-American artists, and Los Angeles's Hunter Hancock, widely regarded as the first DJ in the western part of the country to regularly play R&B on the air. Reaching both black and white audiences, these pioneering DJs played an integral role in bringing African-American music into the mainstream, a process that lay at the heart of the soon-to-come Rock and Roll revolution.

Material Type: Full Course

Book 2, Teenage Rebellion. Chapter 4, Lesson 1: The Musical Roots of the Surf Sound

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In this lesson students will investigate the different elements of the Beach Boys' Surf sound by visiting four listening stations and identifying some essential elements of their early music. These elements include rich vocal harmonies, a production aesthetic influenced by Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" recordings, Chuck Berry-inspired electric guitar riffs, and the liberal use of "reverb" effects facilitated by technical innovations to Fender amplifiers in the early 1960s.

Material Type: Full Course

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