Question 1: Why and how is this musical genre "outside" of your own immediate cultural milieu? How can you understand the cultural perspectives from which this song was written? (You will likely need to do a little research!)
This musical genre, namely the jazz/spiritual genre, is outside of my immediate cultural milieu by virtue of it being a freedom song about the legal emancipation of previously enslaved Black people, as I am not Black and do not typically find myself listening to freedom songs in my spare time, although I may begin doing that more often. Abbey Lincoln’s “Freedom Day” is an exploration of the Black perspective during the Civil Rights era and, further back, the Reconstruction era of American politics, and as such is written as a personal and experiential account of the day that enslaved Black people were told that they were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation (although, of course, because white people have been evil for centuries, that day did not arrive for some enslaved Black people until Juneteenth). This song embodies the values of the Civil Rights movement, and its structure as a repetition and a continuing story being told through the Black population has the purpose of cementing these ideas and the story “in people’s minds as truth, and thus help generate courage to act on that truth in the face of opposition” (Turino pg. 217). It’s beautiful, it’s culturally important, and I am so upset that I have never listened to it before this project.

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