Video footage The Promised Land

The Post-Emancipation South: social system, sharecropping,

race relations, migrations.

The following video footage is intended as a general introduction

to the Post-Emancipation South, which provided the social,
cultural and political milieu from which Rural Blues stemmed.
This includes a large amount of information, both visual and aural.
N.B., several types of aural information feature, and you should
pay attention not only to the narration but also to the
background. In this instance particular types of music form the
soundtrack of the video, and you should try to relate this to the
visuals and listen critically.
The following directions and questions will help to direct your
viewing: read them carefully.
Some questions request particular information that will be
offered at one point, so that you can disregard those questions
once you have collected the information.
Other questions relate to the overall video segment, and you
will need to pay attention to these throughout, rather than
simply gathering facts.
Try to relate particular events that you witness, e.g., the
1927 flood of the Mississippi, to events in recent history, e.g.,
the 2005 New Orleans flood, and reflect on what analogies
exist between them. (This is unlikely to be something that
you will accomplish while viewingalthough you should
take note of analogous contemporary events as they occur to
youand is likely to require reflection over the following
weeks).
Try to take as detailed notes as possible, sit down
immediately after class if possible and review the images
from memory, or discuss them with another member of the
class. You will probably be surprised by how much you retain
soon after the fact, and the detailed notes that you take now
 will probably trigger many of the rich images and sounds
here as we refer back to this footage at various points during
the course.
Enjoy!

Guidelines for Viewing/Questions to address

1. Distinguish between fact (generally presented by the narrator),
and anecdotal evidence (generally related by one of the individuals
featured in the video).
2. Pay particular attention to the accompanying sound track.
How many different types of music do you hear?
When is each played and for what purpose?
How do they relate to the visuals that you are viewing at the
time?
3. What is Jim Crow, and how was it implemented?
4. What is the image we are given of religion, and what
denomination is discussed?
5. What are Juke Joints, and who patronises them?
6. What occasioned the large-scale migrations in the twentieth
century, both rural to urban, and South to North?
7. What are the essential features of sharecropping, and how could
it be used to the sharcroppers disadvantage?
8. What was the significance of Joe Lewis?

While this is documentary video, how the sound track has been
constructed nonetheless owes quite a lot to the traditional use of
music is film. Film music traditionally served three functions.
It provided continuity or served as a suturing device to stitch
together inconsistencies or potentially jarring moments in the
film.
It added a third dimension to the visual, particularly to
convince the audience that the film world is real and extends
in all directions.
 It provided reinforcement to the action, i.e., it was designed
to run parallel with the image track.
The American composer Aaron Copland enumerated the following
reasons for the inclusion of music in film
To reinforce the psychology of the image
To add colour
To add continuity
To underpin theatricality
To add finality
Music in this sense remains definitely secondary to film.