Director's Column

Perhaps we should see this edition of the Southern Register as our music issue. The articles on the new Documenting the Blues marker on the east lawn of Barnard Observatory, the Blues Today Symposium, the Southern Foodways Alliance’s food and music event at the Carter family establishment near Bristol, Tennessee, and Southern Studies students and alumni who are musicians only begin to introduce the musical sides of Southern Studies.

Congratulations to Living Blues for publishing its 200th issue. Putting out a magazine gets more difficult in an online age, and putting one out from a university setting has its own challenges. Cheers to Brett Bonner, Mark Camarigg, and the staff members, writers, volunteers, and subscribers over the years who have made it a quality publication. It was good to see past editors Jim O’Neal, Amy van Singel, David Nelson, Scott Barretta, and current editor Brett Bonner together at the unveiling of the blues marker.

Throughout our history, numerous Southern Studies faculty members, such as past and present professors Bill Ferris, Adam Gussow, Warren Steel, Robbie Ethridge, and Michael Bertrand, have either played music or taught about it, or both. Through his own work and his encouragement of Living Blues and the Blues Archive, Ferris worked to establish the University of Mississippi as a place to study the blues. Gussow teaches and writes about blues and literature, has written a blues memoir, and continues to play blues harmonica. Steel continues to teach a Music Department course, African American Musical Traditions, that is popular with Southern Studies students. Ethridge plays bass in several Oxford bands, and Bertrand, who now teaches history at Tennessee State University, wrote an important book on the life of Elvis Presley. Former Living Blues editor Barretta teaches a popular class, initiated by Peter Aschoff, on the anthropology of the blues.

Even Southern Studies faculty who cannot carry a tune (or don’t do so in public) have studied music. Charles Wilson has written on Elvis and religion, and I wrote an article about 1970s Southern rock and gender. A few people will remember English/Southern Studies professor Bob Brinkmeyer’s radio program in African music. Our newest faculty member studies music, especially hip hop, as part of her larger study of regional identity among African Americans in the urban South. Zandria Robinson, who is finishing her PhD at Northwestern University, will join us in the fall as the new McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology.

Upcoming Center programs also have musical themes. In May, David Wharton will, for the third year, teach a Southern Studies course in conjunction with staff members from the Library of Congress about how to document musical traditions. In October the Southern Foodways Symposium will feature connections between foodways and the music of the South. Our students have benefited from assistantships through the American Music Archive and from close relationships with Living Blues, Media Productions, and the Highway 61 radio program.

Despite all of the teaching and scholarship by the faculty, it is often the interests of Southern Studies students that push the Center into new interests in music. According to the Center’s Web site, at least 23 MA students have completed theses on topics in Southern music, with topics ranging from Austin to Nashville, to blues education, to Elvis and sexuality, to Hee Haw, to Thacker Mountain Radio, to European fascination with African American music, to Bo Carter, Doug Sahm, the Drive-By Truckers, and the Vaughn songbooks. Several other students have pursued internships related to music topics. Undergraduates have often turned to music for research topics, and current students are studying, among other things, Southern hip hop, blues tourism, and Southern themes in the work of Bob Dylan. And, as I’Nasah Crockett’s article in this issue attests, numerous students and alumni are talented and dedicated musicians.

Over the years, Southern Studies students have started bands and disbanded them, served in the house bands for Oxford institutions ranging from the Gin to Thacker Mountain Radio, performed at birthday events for luminaries from Charles Wilson to Eudora Welty, written hundreds of songs, recorded albums, created videos, lived on the road, stayed up too late, and made their parents worry about them. They have been lead singers and backup singers and deejays, sung in and recorded gospel choirs, and played everything from the guitar, mandolin, and banjo to trumpet, violin, keyboards, and magic ukulele. They have written the leading guide for blues tourists, edited the Music volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, documented the life of folklorist John Work, made films about musicians, run blues museums, booked acts for blues clubs, edited and copyedited Living Blues, written for music publications from Oxford to Atlanta to New Orleans, worked at radio stations and jazz festivals, documented shape-note singing schools, and taught and interpreted music in the schools. They have played music, much of it with Southern roots, all over the world. Maybe someday they’ll all come back to Oxford and put on a show.

One can speculate about what brings so many people with music interests to Southern Studies. Perhaps it is the music of the South and especially Mississippi, and we can hope the Blues Archive and Living Blues, and the encouragement from faculty members and the examples of other students, are in part responsible. Beyond that, studying music from a cultural perspective raises questions of the relationships between authenticity and innovation, musicians and their audience, poetry and melody, sacred and secular, performance and setting, youth and age, and men and women, and all of those dichotomies offer promising beginnings for study. Music can both challenge social boundaries and establish new ones, so it is ideal for considering issues of cultural politics. And my guess is that a lot of people study music for the same reason that they play it—because they love it so much that they couldn’t stop even if they wanted.

I am happy to report that despite the current economic problems, Southern Studies graduates are being accepted into impressive graduate programs in history, English, and American Studies and are heading into divinity schools, film schools, architecture schools, and law schools. They
are entering teaching programs, writing books (and, of course, songs) and finding positions doing something close to what they want.

Ted Ownby