The Jim Crow era was a rough time for African Americans.

In every area of life, they faced inequality and racial violence.

Despite the hardship and terror, they persevered.

They did not let hate stamp out their love or pain eliminate their joy.

And we can hear that bittersweet blend of hard history when we listen to the blues.

I'm Hassan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Music Reconstructed from teaching hard history.

When music is rethought, remixed, and reimagined, that takes research, And the results can reveal insights into history

for educators and students.

During this special four-part series,

music expert and historian Charles Hughes

brings us conversations with contemporary musicians

who are exploring the sounds, songs, and stories of the Jim Crow era through their music.

In this episode, Charles introduces us to musician, songwriter, poet, and host of the Call and Response podcast, Adia Victoria.

On her album, A Southern Gothic, Victoria blends history with the contemporary, the collective,

the collective with the personal, as she shows us how the blues, as she puts it, is doing

the very emotionally mature work of acknowledging these troubling emotions that are as

human as joy. Here's Charles.

Adia Victoria is one of the great contemporary blues musicians, someone who draws on the traditions

of Robert Johnson and Memphis Minnie and Victoria Spivey and all the blues greats, very much

in the tradition of the blues as a way to think about and understand experiences.

From the very beginning, blues music was connected not only to the way

that African Americans had to survive and had to figure out ways to live in a Jim Crow society,

...