Class to discover ‘Blues Legacies’

A new class this semester takes 25 students — and anyone else who’d like to join them — where the blues actually happens.

On selected Thursday afternoons through April 26, Ronald Radano’s Blues Legacies course will meet in Luther’s Blues Club, the nexus of live blues music in Madison. And any UW–Madison student or member of the larger community is invited to join them.

“We wanted to get the class into a place where the blues are performed regularly as a living art form,” says Radano, a UW–Madison professor of Afro-American studies and music.

Location aside, class participants and guests will be able to talk with people at the pinnacle of the blues genre: critics, authors, museum curators and musicians.

The first session Feb. 22 brought renowned blues critic Francis Davis to Luther’s from Philadelphia, via a hookup engineered by the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Class members are using Davis’ textbook, “The History of the Blues.” Radano says the students took full advantage of the opportunity to talk live with Davis.

“Students were was especially interested in how the blues canon was formed, and why women blues artists seemed to disappear after 1925. I think this shows that the class is growing increasingly sensitive to blues history as a story shaped as much by those who write it as by the facts themselves,” Radano says.

The public sessions to be held at Luther’s will feature a mix of live presentations and distance learning technology, says DoIT’s Kathy Christoph, who created the electronic blend for the course. Technically, the high point will be a two-way session with Chicago blues harpist Billy Branch. Branch will talk with students at Luther’s via a remote satellite link from the University of Chicago on Thursday, April 26.

Some of the classes will bring live speakers and performers to Luther’s, including:

• Charles McGovern, cultural historian at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Today, March 1, McGovern will discuss the interracial roots of R&B and rock music.
• Blues guitarist Jim Schwall, formerly half of the Siegel-Schwall Band. Schwall will present a lecture-demonstration of blues performance styles March 29.
• Guthrie Ramsey, University of Pennsylvania musicologist. Ramsey will discuss “Blues and the Ethnographic Truth” April 5. A quartet of UW–Madison music students will help him illustrate his points.

Radano says the public will be welcome at these sessions, 1:20-2:35 p.m. at Luther’s, 1401 University Ave.

For more information about the course, contact Radano at (608) 263-1642, rmradano@facstaff.wisc.edu.