As profound as the blues has been to the national music experience, it has only occasionally entered the American classroom, mostly by individual teachers who, as committed blues fans, work to independently create ways to integrate the music into curricula. The much anticipated series, The Blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese and scheduled to premiere on PBS September 28th, presents a unique opportunity to extend the reach of blues in the classroom, bringing this seminal music form into high school classrooms as never before.

National Educational Outreach Campaign

Experience Music Project, in association with the Memphis-based Blues Foundation, has produced extensive educational materials to support The Blues series. Central to these materials are blues lesson plans for grades 9–12 in the social studies, English and music disciplines. Lesson topics include the blues in history, using the blues to study geography, racial and gender issues in the blues, the blues as poetry, identifying the blues in literature, the blues beat, making blues music, and the impact of the blues. These lesson plans are designed to make the blues accessible to teachers regardless of their level of blues expertise.

These lesson plans are now available to educators in The Blues Teacher’s Guide, which was mailed this summer to 25,000 social studies, English and music department chairpersons across the country. The guide includes a compact disc comprising the seminal blues songs referenced in the lesson activities, essays on the history of the blues and blues musicology, and a blues bibliography, discography, and glossary.

A downloadable version of the Blues Teacher’s Guide, including song samples from the accompanying CD, can now be found at pbs.org/theblues.