Since last week I went with a more technical and underlying mechanisms kind of post, I have decided to theme this post over the historical aspect of my projects research. As stated before, I am apart of a project that is working on creating an interactive 3d online model of a historical blues block in the heart of downtown Atlanta, which is ale the heart of the Georgia State University campus. With this being said, since having taken on this project,  I can’t help but relate my everyday strolls in Atlanta to its bluesy history. I wanted to shed some insight and perspective on how the past of Atlanta’s streets can be seen today.

This weekend I had the privilege to attend Atlanta’s biggest music festival, Music Midtown. It is a two day music festival at beautiful Piedmont Park. The festival, in its peak years, reached an attendance of 300,000 people. Therefore this year, as a multitude of people traveled to Atlanta for the festival so did vendors of all kinds and street performers of all kinds. These vendors and street performers were looking for success either financially or just through popularity. They took advantage of the crowd. Walking both towards Piedmont park and leaving the festival from and to Marta both vendors and street performers caught my attention but I gravitated more towards the dedication and up beat attitude of the street performers.

When reflecting on all the street performers I was confronted by, I began to realize their uncanny similarities. All performers had some sort of bluesy aspect to them, either by their instruments, songs played, or style of playing. The performers included a duo of two young males, one with a trumpet and one with a saxophone. They played contemporary songs with their instruments. Both the trumpet and saxophone are common and essential instruments used in a blues song and band, and are honestly not all that popular in today’s top hits music. In addition to these performers was an older man with a bass guitar playing very bluesy riffs and rhythms, he played with such conviction and when looking back acted as a preserver of blues. Also seen, was a man playing the guitar while also playing the harmonica that was strapped to him. Both the guitar and harmonica are very prevalent in blues music. All these performers displayed a modern day  interpretation or influence of Atlanta’s past.

This experience was very eye-opening, since I would have expected much more contemporary music played by street performers given that the festival’s lineup was mostly of contemporary music. I believe that Atlanta’s history has influenced many individuals even today. Although Atlanta was a blues hub in the 1930s, you can still see the preservation and strong influence that the blues period had on Atlanta and its current population.

With this information I plan to research if there are organizations or locales around Atlanta that attempt to preserve this genre of music as well as how and why it is done. I believe connecting with this aspect of my research will allow me to better understand why this project is important and relevant to us today as well as how it is.