Compare and contrast Scott Joplin’s The Easy Winners with Louis Armstrong’s Hotter Than That. Take the musical differences and similarities you hear into account, but try to connect them to the larger, and perhaps surprising, effects of social oppression upon popular music.

Music Within a Repressive Society

prompt:

For over 100 years, between 1865 and 1965, popular music evolved in Jim Crow America. Ragtime and New Orleans Brass Band styles both evolved during a period of pervasive racism and segregation. How did that surface, if at all, in the music of Joplin and Armstrong? Compare and contrast Scott Joplin’s The Easy Winners with Louis Armstrong’s Hotter Than That. Take the musical differences and similarities you hear into account, but try to connect them to the larger, and perhaps surprising, effects of social oppression upon popular music. Your paper should not exceed two pages.

Things to keep in mind:

Melody, rhythm, form, instrumentation

Overall musical impressions

Societal impressions based on your readings so far