This story was originally published in The Crescent  of George Fox University. It was written by Crescent writer Julia Howell.

A new music class, History of Rock and Roll, is being offered [spring 2015] as a special topics elective course. It will be a cultural and musical survey of the history of rock and roll.

Instructor of Flute and Music History Sophia Tegart is teaching the class. She will cover topics from Bill Haley and the Comets to Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Folk Rock, Soul and Motown, Punk Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Christian Rock, and Dance music, to contemporary pop music.

“We are going to touch on as much as possible,” said Tegart.

Tegart is looking forward to the class because it encompasses the social and cultural changes that accompanied the genres: hairstyles, clothing, language, food, and politics.

She thought of the idea for a rock and roll class while teaching another music class, Music in World Cultures.

“My past students said that one of the things they really enjoyed was the presentations on popular music groups from the various countries we studied,” said Tegart. “The students loved learning about Baba Seghal, who took Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’ and translated it into Hindi. They also loved learning about the ‘Madonna’ of China, Anita Mui. The entire class seemed to love learning about The Beatles’ George Harrison and his study of the sitar with Ravi Shankar. I thought to myself one day that it would be really great to give the students a class that covered rock and roll in depth.”

She did some research and realized that many other universities offer a class in the history of rock and roll. It seemed fitting to bring the idea to GFU.

“I wanted to make sure George Fox had one too,” said Tegart. “It’s a great way for students to learn about the social, cultural, and political changes that occurred in the U.S. during the twentieth century, and to see the trends that are occurring today, and it’s super fun to learn about that while listening to quality music.”