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How might we come to understand the blues as critical for ideational formations, identity, and institutional change for Black Americans in the twentieth century? Blues and jazz are not often understood as mediums for political thought and action. Popular culture has always been an avenue for Black Americans to express and influence American politics broadly. The blues has long been a Black working-class epistemology for Black survival and thriving, even further the blues is a foundation for building social democracy for all people. This course will examine how the blues and its extension into jazz critique and explain conditions of racial domination in the plantation South and new relations of domination in the urban North. With a particular focus on Baltimore, Chicago, and New York City, students will understand and analyze the socio-political life of the blues using historical institutionalist methods in political science.