With "Backwater Blues," Bessie Smith takes up tragic event in the 1920s and documents it in very socially-conscious song. This was fairly common among 1920s blues and folk singers, who not only wrote typical songs about love and loss of love but often documented other real-life events. For example, I argue in the Great Migration and the Role of the Blues Queen slides that besides providing sheer entertainment for their audiences, many of the blues queens served as chroniclers, or you might say journalists, of the Great Migration, relaying information to both African Americans already in the North and folks down South who had yet to make the trek. Although it is stated in the document you read that contains "Blackwater Blues" that it was not written about the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, it came to represent that flood. Why would hearing about the floods down South be important to African-American audiences in both the North and the South? What can we learn from a song and what can a song convey about an event that you might not find in a printed document? Can a song be considered a valid document of an event? Why or why not? Can you give me an example of another song that documents an event?

With "Backwater Blues," Bessie Smith takes up tragic event in the 1920s and documents it in very socially-conscious song. This was fairly common among 1920s blues and folk singers, who not only wrote typical songs about love and loss of love but often documented other real-life events. For example, I argue in the Great Migration and the Role of the Blues Queen slides that besides providing sheer entertainment for their audiences, many of the blues queens served as chroniclers, or you might say journalists, of the Great Migration, relaying information to both African Americans already in the North and folks down South who had yet to make the trek. Although it is stated in the document you read that contains "Blackwater Blues" that it was not written about the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, it came to represent that flood. Why would hearing about the floods down South be important to African-American audiences in both the North and the South? What can we learn from a song and what can a song convey about an event that you might not find in a printed document? Can a song be considered a valid document of an event? Why or why not? Can you give me an example of another song that documents an event?