Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird by Michael J. Meyer Page A

eight years before the song and no evidence of an explicit connection exists, it is nonetheless uncanny how similar Cash’s portrayal is to that of Atticus Finch. The crooner explains, “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down / Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime/ But is there because he’s a victim of the times” (lines 5–8). Atticus wears black for the same unfortunate people in To Kill a Mockingbird by treating everyone as equals, representing Tom Robinson in a hopeless case, and even risking his family’s well-being to do the right thing.
    The Carter Family is widely considered the first family of country music, and A. P. Carter’s legacy for the timeless songs such as “Wabash Cannonball,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “No Depression in Heaven” is eternal. Chapter 24 marks a point where few answers seem to quench the thirst of questions left by Tom’s attempted escape from prison and death. In much the same way, the Great Depression left Americans with fewer answers than questions. Carter’s words in “No Depression in Heaven” relate to both situations, “For fear the hearts of men are failing / For these are latter days we know” (lines 1–2) and are resolved by Carter’s matriculation to heaven in the chorus. As both situations—the unfair racism in Maycomb and hopelessness during the Great Depression—cast a shadow over many, there is, in fact, relief in the future.
    Discussion
    While the example soundtracks provide two distinctly different perspectives on the novel, they also represent our thinking behind the connections we made. As students experience the process of making connections and being required to explain and defend them, they most certainly will have to perform close readings of each text—the novel and the lyrics—in order to make the connection clear to the audience. The unfortunate reality of students today, however, is that they see little relevance, if any, in what they are being asked to do and how the task will benefit them in the long term. Using the soundtrack lesson provides students the necessary relevance to utilizing and building schema and long-term comprehension. As students make connections between their understandings of music and what they may consider an archaic text, they are doing more than finding a song with a message that is similar to the chapter’s. Like the different perspectives of our two example soundtracks, students’ perspectives—via background knowledge—are also distinctly different from the teacher’s and their peers. Oftentimes these differences contribute to what may be perceived as a lack of understanding, when in fact students are discovering, and thus learning, important facts of life. We must recognize that students see, read, and understand a simple theme differently than we do. The teacher, unfortunately, knowing the requirements and objectives of “understanding” a given theme, might interpret this difference as a failure to understand the text. However, this may not be true at all. For example, when a teacher explains (or lectures) to students the theme based on “loss of innocence,” a student who may never have had the privilege of innocence may not understand the lectured concept; however, when students connect a message in a song—they have more than likely already made a self-to-lyric association—to the text, they are using the song’s message as a bridge to broaden or clarify their understanding of the text. So, while a student may not seem to grasp the teacher’s use of the expression “loss of innocence” as a thematic emphasis of To Kill a Mockingbird , her song choice may discuss poverty, parental neglect or aloneness (abandonment), abuse, or fear; in actuality, her connection to and identification with the