crossroads blues experience

What is Crossroads Blues Experience?

Crossroads Blues Experience is a live performance/multimedia educational program for people of all ages. Originally conceived as a program for schools, we also perform at public venues where all ages can come together to share in the experience of our American story.

Blues Is American History

Most people associate blues music with gritty vocals and full bands with electric instruments and drums. But before the invention of electric instruments, the people of the American South were imprinting their own experience and history on their music mostly using two instruments they could carry on their backs or in their pocket — the acoustic guitar and the harmonica.

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From Texas to Appalachia, each region developed a distinct character of the blues. What they all share is a feeling that touched people all over the world and is deeply rooted in the American experience.

Our Mission

Our mission is to inspire, educate and engage students with a multimedia experience interweaving live music, geography, social studies, and history based on the narrative of the origins of blues music in the Mississippi Delta at the beginning of the 20th century.

Program Structure

The Crossroads Blues Experience program comprises a series of iconic American songs, each of which represents an era associated with a mode of transportation or a pivotal event in American history. Each song is accompanied with a multimedia show that presents the historical progression of that era or imagery from that event.

Each of these eras experienced a transformation sometime around 100 years ago as our society transitioned from the coal-driven steam engine to liquid fossil fuels and the internal-combustion engine. At that time, blues music was also in its formative years. Our program reinforces these overlapping timelines with multimedia imagery to help students visualize and conceptualize the progressive chronology we call history.

I. Introduction

Our program opens with an inspirational short (4-minute) video entitled Things You Can Do If You‘re You.

I. Walking Blues (Son House) & Backwater Blues (Bessie Smith)

The Mississippi Delta has the distinction of being both the birthplace of blues as well as the most economically depressed region in America.

II. Down By The Riverside (African-American Spiritual)

The Great Mississippi River and the Steamboat Era are inextricably linked in our national consciousness.

III. This Train (African-American Spiritual)

While the steam locomotive did bring about the end of the Riverboat Era, the transition to the Railroad Era took many decades.

IV. Key to the Highway (Big Bill Broonzy)

In the extended program for stage venues, we continue our journey with the arrival of the Automobile Age and Thomas Edison‘s fleet of electric taxis at the beginning of the 20th century.

V. I‘ll Fly Away (Albert E. Brumley)

Nothing will give you the blues faster than building an airplane that doesn‘t fly.