Blues Poetry

An In-Person Master Class with Doug Curry

Participants will deepen their knowledge of the literary, aural, and oral legacy of the blues by engaging with Doug Curry’s and other practitioners’ blues poems and songs. Listening to recorded examples, they will discuss and interpret the overt and subliminal messages inherent in this time-honored tradition. Discussion will center on varied kinds of blues poetry, from spoken word to street rhymes, to song, and their function in the Black community over time. Participants will also consider blues poetry as a universal art form applicable to any disaffected community. An in-class “jam session” will encourage them to contribute original lines to an impromptu blues poem, created by the group. Participants will receive copies of a discography and bibliography, as well as a CD recording of a three-hour “Blacks & Blues” radio program.

NB: Sexual, violent, and other adult materials may be presented.

Doug Curry is a native New Yorker, born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx. A 1974 graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University, he is a poet, writer, radio host, and actor. Since 1982, he has been the voice and radio host of “Blacks & Blues with Doug Curry,” heard online and on terrestrial radio in Western and Central New York, as well as in the international blues capital of Chicago, Illinois. Doug has voiced film and audio books and appeared in a variety of dramatic roles onstage and remotely for local theater entities, including, among others, Blackfriars Theater and its Hourglass Reading Service, the Bronze Collective, the Off-Monroe Players, the Penfield Players, and Rochester Institute of Technology’s NTID. He currently serves as Vice President of Just Poets, an award-winning literary group based in Rochester, NY.  Doug has been an automotive sales professional since 1987.