This thesis is one of articulating relations. One side of this thesis is an interdisciplinary case study of two New Orleans cultural objects, Jazz and a vernacular architecture called a shotgun house, as having ontologically similar design principles, values, and social histories. Applying scholarship, archival material, and conversation from Black studies cultural theorists, geologists, geographers, ethnomusicologists, artists, artisans, architects, daylaborers, nightworkers and organic intellectuals, I express conjunction between these practices to both emerge from what scholar Clyde Woods calls, a “‘blues epistemology’…a system of explanation that informs their daily life, organizational activity, culture, religion, and social movements… [in response to]… namely disenfranchisement, debt peonage, Jim Crow, and legally sanctioned official and private terrorism (1996: 16).” Ceremony of building in your own form as an expression of sovereignty. How similar could that ceremony perform between mediums? The other side articulates a metaphorical relation between blackness and some of the earth’s geological processes. For instance, diasporic cultures employing fugitive organization systems seen through a geological lens can begin to resemble sedimentary rock cycles including erosion (diaspora), deposition (plantation), diagenesis (production of ‘blackness’ as an ongoing legal and social phenomena), and diapiric uplift (Black arts’ use of non-linear cultural progression/Sankofa/looking back while moving ahead). Displacement as a colonial-induced geological event. To be in practice with how ethnomathematics professor Ron Eglash sees many African logic systems presenting “design informed by social concepts” (1999: 20), I choose to connect the social history of Black music and Southeastern regional geology to engage together in a pedagogical practice I call “deltaic thinking.” The organizing philosophy that considers the instrumentation of sound as a relating medium to bridge between Black music (historical collective emotion) cultural characteristics and the characteristics of water as a global scale. As water systems flow bounded by western system imposition (levees), what typological resonance in how water response to impounded with the response to imposition inside the music of 19th century American Southern Blacks (blues people, Amira Baraka) that socially interpreted violent disenfranchisement? Black music as an emotionally historical material document of colonialist phenomena. In this way, consider this thesis as an effort in geologizing blackness. The river is not a place, it is a practice.