American Music, Part 1

Objective & content

Two friends talk about four kinds of American music and the places they come from. One explains and the other asks questions, on a road trip with four stops: jazz in New Orleans, started by African American musicians more than a hundred years ago, with Louis Armstrong and his trumpet and brass bands that still play in the street; the blues in the Mississippi Delta, slow and often sad, with B.B. King and his guitar called Lucille (and why it is called the blues: in English, blue can mean sad); country music in Nashville, Music City, with the Grand Ole Opry, a radio show from 1925 that is still on every week; and rock and roll in Memphis, at Sun Studio, where visitors stand on the spot where Elvis Presley stood. The grammar focus is present simple, for the music and the places today, with there is (there's, Is there?), questions (What does jazz sound like?) and prepositions of place and time (in the south, on the radio, in 1925); the Elvis story is a short past simple aside, for listening only. Learners listen for the four places, the instruments and the years.

Materials & prerequisites

• Student sheet and teacher sheet, each as HTML and PDF (in the episode's printables folder).
• Prerequisites: present simple, can for possibility and saying years in English.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c3-child-and-wider-environment and art-and-expression-of-feelings, so it fits cycle 3 (6e) and the 6e axis Art and expression of feelings. It also fits the music topics of German Klasse 6 and 7. The episode targets CEFR A1+.