Mississippi: Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum

The Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum is a new initiative of the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) that integrates the history, culture and art of Mississippi blues music into the state’s classrooms. The curriculum has 18 lessons, three each for six subject areas—music, meaning, cotton, transportation, civil rights and media. While the curriculum was developed for 4th-grade Mississippi-history students, it can be adapted for students as advanced as the 12th grade. The curriculum is tied to the Mississippi Blues Trail (a project of the governor-appointed Mississippi Blues Commission), and teachers are encouraged to use the trail’s website as a resource for images, maps, films and more. In addition, the Blues Trail Curriculum has a host of on-line teacher resources for all six subject areas, including many field recordings, interviews and videos from the William R. Ferris Collection at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the Alan Lomax Archive. To facilitate teachers’ hands-on experience with the curriculum, MAC is holding four day-long workshops this fall. MAC developed the new curriculum with the support of an NEA Folk Arts Infrastructure Grant. Learn more about the project by contacting MAC Folk and Traditional Arts Director Mary Margaret White.