Last week, Sophomore English students wrapped up their music bracket competition which was between Vietnam War  and Civil Rights songs. After hearing many good things about this competition, I decided to look into what exactly it was!

I first started by asking students what this competition was about, their answers were that it was a competition where each student got two songs, one in the Vietnam bracket and one in the Civil Rights bracket. Students had to give information about their song and play it for the class, in later rounds they also had to state why they should win. The competition starts in the Vietnam bracket between each student, one goes against two, the winner faces the winner of three versus four. After the Vietnam bracket is done, they move on to the Civil rights bracket. It has the same layout and at the very end, the winner of the Vietnam bracket faces the winner of the Civil rights bracket. The last thing they said was that the reason for this bracket was to give recognition to these important songs in our history. Now that we have established the rules and what is happening I wanted to find out about some of the songs. Some of the notable songs in the Vietnam bracket include: War Pigs by Black Sabbath, Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Imagine by John Lennon. Some of the notable songs in the Civil rights bracket include: Respect by Aretha Franklin, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody by The Freedom Fighters, and Selma March by Grant Green. 

The first one-on-one interview I had was with Kail Fickel. When asked if he thought his songs could win he told me,“Definitely, my song [The Promised Land by Chuck Berry] upset [the song students wanted to win] Respect [by Aretha Franklin], which is a huge song. If I could beat that, I don’t think there is any song that I can’t beat.” I also wondered what song he thought was the best on the entire bracket, Kail said with ease, “Fortunate Son, 100 percent. Its the best song on the whole bracket.” Kail had one final remark in which he stated, “I want to do this again, it’s different but so fun to see the whole class enjoy what we were doing.”

 I also was lucky enough to interview Rozlyn Wills; my first question for Rozlyn was what songs she had, “I had Purple Haze by Jimmy Hendrix and Inner City Blues by Marvin Gaye.” Rozlyn seemed very adamant about the fact Fortunate Son would win with ease. This ended up being true for her class, third period, with Fortunate Son coming out on top.

This competition was a huge success with the students and they are hoping they could do something like this again!