posted by Amy Hillier

on May 24, 2006

I was listening to "Hambone, Hambone" on the cd, "The Long Road to Freedom: An Antholog of Black Music" that Tim found at the Music Library. It features kids chanting/singing a rhyme and hitting there thighs to create a rhythm. It's part of a "city sounds" section on the cd, based on familiar sounds in the 19th century city. Kids rapping, beating on plastic buckets with sticks, and wrapping on the table with their hand and fists today seems like the modern equivalent of the "Hambone" song. We should find a way to link rap and hip hop to our research on the DuBois era. Maybe we can design teaching assignments to encourage kids to make these connections and comparisons.

As for including music and recordings in our website, I received an encouraging email from the director of Penn's music library today. He said it would be risky to post commercial recordings in their entirety, but mentioned that Amazon gets away with 30-second previews of cds on their site. That might be enough. He also suggested streaming the recordings rather than allowing people to download them. Hopefully we'll find some public domain recordings that we can include.