Teaching with song lyrics has many popular variations. The Common Core State Standards discourage pre-teaching, leaving students somewhat adrift. Song lyrics possess the potential to scaffold students' schema in select social studies topics. Using reciprocal teaching (Palinscar & Brown 1984) within the reading workshop students ponder provided song lyrics to activate schema, questions, and a purpose for reading social studies content. By analyzing student work, instructional needs are determined, to strengthen schema and position students to deeper reading with subsequent texts. In this example, students closely read the eighties rock-classic "Cherokee by Europe" (1987) to build a context and create understanding around the Trail of Tears.