Music of the South Symposium

September 2 and 3, 2005

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Division of Outreach and Continuing Education are sponsoring the first annual Music of the South Symposium on the University of Mississippi's Oxford campus September 2 & 3. The program will explore the origins of Southern music, discover how each Southern region produced its own sound, and learn how Southern music influenced the rest of the nation. Registrants will hear presentations by leading scholars, enjoy live music performances, and tour the Blues Archive at the J. D. Williams Library. Country music scholar Bill Malone will present the keynote address. Friday night's party at Taylor Grocery will offer catfish and bluegrass, and Saturday's evening program will feature Southern Music on the Square.

Keynote Speaker

Bill Malone is Professor Emeritus of History at Tulane University. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include United States cultural history, Southern folk culture, Southern music, and American labor. Dr. Malone is a former Guggenheim fellow whose books include Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music, Country Music, USA, and Southern Music/American Music. He was producer and annotator for the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music and is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the Encyclopedia of Country Music.

Other Featured Speakers

Ben Austin is an associate professor of sociology and director of the undergraduate sociology program at Middle Tennessee State University. For the past 15 years he has taught a course entitled "The Social Context of Southern Music." His publications include the article "The Images of Aging and the Elderly in the Lyrics of Country Music" in the Journal of Educational Gerontology.

Slick Ballinger is called a "young man with an old soul" because he has played with Pinetop Perkins, Othar Turner, and T-Model Ford, among others, yet is only 21 years old. After learning guitar while a teenager, Ballinger participated in several blues competitions, most notably as the representative of the Howlin' Wolf Blues Club at the 2004 International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee. His first album will be released later this year on Oh Boy Records.

Michael T. Bertrand is an assistant professor of history at Tennessee State University. A native of South Louisiana, he has also taught at the University of Memphis, Middle Tennessee State University, and the University of Mississippi. His teaching and research interests focus on Southern history, culture, and music, with an emphasis on comprehending the relationship between popular culture and social change. The University of Illinois Press recently released a second (paperback) edition of his first book, Race, Rock, and Elvis.

Cory Branan hails from Southaven, Mississippi. He was recognized for his songwriting as Newcomer of the Year by the Memphis chapter of NARAS before his debut album The Hell You Say was released. Branan has been featured in Rolling Stone and Billboard as an up-and-coming artist.

Jim Brewer is the founder and chairman of the board of the 10-year-old Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. He is the editor of a book on Mississippi musicians and producer of two CDs and a map related to Mississippi musicians and state music sites. He guided the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame into their new home at the Jackson International Airport in Jackson. He was recently recognized by Blue Cross Blue Shield as an ageless hero for his work on behalf of Mississippi musicians and music.

Ellie Campbell is a second-year graduate student in the Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. She did her undergraduate work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and is originally from Anniston, Alabama. Her paper is on the Drive-By Truckers' music, particularly the way they use and rework themes and images from '70s Southern Rock bands to discuss Southern masculinity, especially in relation to class and race.

George Worlasi Kwasi Dor is the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Chair of Ethnomusicology and Assistant Professor of Music. Dor holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the University of Mississippi faculty in 2001 and teaches in the Department of Music and the Honors College. Dor is founder and director of Ole Miss African Drum Ensemble and coeditor and contributor to Multiple Interpretations of Dynamics of Creativity and Knowledge in African Music Traditions: A Festechrift in Honor of Akin Euba.

Adam Gussow is an assistant professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. A former member of the Harlem blues duo Satan and Adam, he is the author of two books: Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir and Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition.

Robert Hart grew up in South Carolina and received a BA from Furman University in 1995. He received an MA in history from Clemson in 1997 and a PhD from the University of Alabama in 2004. His dissertation, "The Santee-Cooper Landscape: Culture and Environment in the South Carolina Lowcountry," examines the social, cultural, ecological consequences of South Carolina's largest New Deal project. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication and working on a new manuscript that focuses on Southern music in the 20th century.

Cary Hudson has been a member of The Hilltops (1988-1992) and Blue Mountain (1993-2001), and currently plays guitar and harmonica, and sings with the Taylor Grocery Band. The Mississippi native recently released his first solo album, The Phoenix, on Black Dog Records, which melds blues with mountain music.

Greg Johnson is the curator of the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi and was consulting editor of the Encyclopedia of the Blues, due out this October from Routledge Press. Johnson also plays traditional Irish music on Celtic harp, tin whistle, bodhran, and bass.

The Jones Sisters (yes, they really are sisters) are Tambra, Tara, Twanda, Dorothy (Lu-Lu), and Brittany (Miss Love). They live in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Tambra, the oldest, started singing 20 years ago at the age of 3. They have performed on two movie tracts, A Time to Kill and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Their album Life?s Not Easy is a collection of original gospel songs and older arrangements that fit their powerful style.

Betty Lou Jones is a native of Macon, Mississippi. She graduated from Mississippi University for Women and attended graduate school at the University of Tennessee School of Social Work in Memphis, Tennessee. She is currently president of Tte Jimmie Rodgers Foundation and is very active in many community projects in Meridian, Mississippi. She is married to J. W. Jones, a graduate of the University of Mississippi; they have three children (all University of Mississippi graduates) and four grandchildren.

Kevin Kehrberg is a doctoral student in musicology at the University of Kentucky. His recently completed master's thesis dealt with the original gospel quartet works of bluegrass musician Bill Monroe. Aside from his studies, he is active as a bassist and has performed and recorded in a variety of musical settings, including the album One Hand on the Radio, released in April 2005. Kehrberg is also proud of helping found the first ever University of Kentucky String Band in the fall of 2004, an ensemble devoted to preserving and promoting Kentucky's rich heritage of traditional music.

Tracey E. W. Laird earned her PhD from the University of Michigan and currently serves as assistant professor of music at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She is the author of Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music along the Red River and a native of the Hayride's hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.

Tim Lee has been performing for over 20 years. His earliest work was with The Windbreakers, who released six albums and a recent retrospective, Time Machine: 1982-2002 (Paisley Pop Records). Lee released his first solo album What Time Will Tell in 1988 and has subsequently recorded five others, his most latest being No Discretion in 2004 on the Paisley Pop label.

Odie Lindsey comes to the University of Mississippi Southern Studies Program from Chicago, where he taught at Loyola University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and subpar country songs, his work has appeared in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and the Yalobusha Review, among others. He received a 2005 Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs grant for literature.

Bill Malone is professor of history emeritus at Tulane University. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include United States cultural history, Southern folk culture, Southern music, and American labor. Malone is a former Guggenheim fellow whose books include Don?t Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music, Country Music, USA, and Southern Music/American Music. He was producer and annotator for the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music and is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the Encyclopedia of Country Music.

Janice Monti is professor and Cair of sociology and criminology at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, where she pursues teaching and research interests in popular culture, racial identity, and social change. For the past three years, Monti has worked with the University Diversity Initiative to expand offerings in the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum to include experiential learning opportunities in African American culture and music. As part of these efforts, she has developed and conducted annual "domestic studies" courses that bring students to Memphis and the Mississippi Delta with a focus on the musical and racial heritage of this region.

Larry Morrisey has served as the Heritage Program Director for the Mississippi Arts Commission since 1998. He has produced several special initiatives for the Commission, focusing on the traditional arts in Mississippi, including radio programs, conferences, and a traveling exhibit. Morrisey holds a master's degree in Folk Studies from Western Kentucky University, where he researched the work of John Lair, creator of the Renfro Valley Barn Dance radio program.

Sy Oliver holds a PhD in musicology concentrating on Southern Regional Music (with a 1996 dissertation in ethnomusicology: "African American Music Traditions of Northeast Mississippi"), an MA in music education and recording arts from the University of Iowa, and a BA in music education from Rust College (with a concentration in music education and religion). His general area of specialty is sacred and secular African American music traditions found in the Mid-South. He is the producer and founder of Rust College's Northeast Mississippi Blues and Gospel Folk Festival, which ran for 15 years.

Ted Olson is associate professor English and Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of Blue Ridge Folklife, the editor of CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual, the Music Section Editor for the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, and the author of Breathing in Darkness, a collection of poems. His most recent book is The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, which he coedited with Charles K. Wolfe.

Ted Ownby teaches history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Subduing Satan: Recreation, Religion, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 and American Dreams in Mississippi: Shopping, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998.

Tamara Palmer is a San Francisco-based writer, editor, and DJ. A former editor at URB Magazine, she recently released her first book, Country Fried Soul: Adventures in Dirty South Hip-Hop and currently contributes to outlets including the Associated Press and New Times Newspapers.

Nikos Pappas, a doctoral student at the University of Kentucky, has been active both as a scholar and performer in the field of American music. As a scholar, his research interests include Colonial and Federalist era orchestral music, antebellum Southern and Midwestern sacred music traditions, old-time fiddle and string band traditions, and psychedelic music of the 1960s. He completed a PBS documentary soundtrack for Opening the Door West, detailing the settling of the Northwest Territory, and is currently working with Ron Pen on a new edition of The Kentucky Harmony by Annanias Davison. Pappas is the associate director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music.

Diane Pecknold is the postdoctoral teaching scholar at the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society at the University of Louisville. She is coeditor, with Kristine McCusker, of A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music and is currently completing work on The Selling Sound: Country Music, Commercialism, and the Politics of Popular Culture in the Nashville Sound Era.

Stephen Shearon is professor of musicology and graduate coordinator in the McLean School of Music at Middle Tennessee State University. Born and raised near Wake Forest, North Carolina, he earned degrees in music at Northwestern University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His primary research interests include the musics and cultures of southern Italy and the southeastern United States. He is currently writing a book, Discovering the South through Music.

Anna Smith is a graduate student in English at University of Mississippi. Her current area of focus is Postcolonial Theory. She received her BA in Literature from Ball State in Indiana and spent a year studying music, literature, and politics at Keele University in England.

Jill N. Smith is the director of the Union County Heritage Museum in New Albany, Mississippi. One of the Museum's annual events is the Down from the Hills Heritage Music and Folk Life Festival in May, in which old-time fiddlers, as well as a variety of quality area musicians who play everything from the Scots-Irish fiddle tunes to bluegrass, folk, and shaped note gospel, are featured. Smith's grandfather and great grandfather were fiddlers of the old time tradition.

Taylor Grocery Band formed in Oxford, Mississippi, in 2002 and is comprised of Cary Hudson (guitar, harmonica, vocals), Ed Dye (dobro, vocals), Ted Gainey (rhythms, vocals), Tommy Bryant Ledford (guitar, banjo, mandolin, vocals), and Justin Showah (bass, vocals). As the house band at Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Mississippi, the group plays alternative country, roots-rock, folk, and blues. They released an eponymous album in 2002.

Tricia Walker is a singer and songwriter whose songs are steeped in thepassion, pain, and grace of the American South. Born and raised in Mississippi, Tricia has become one of the clearest voices of her own time and place. Her music has been recorded by Faith Hill, Patty Loveless, and Alison Krauss, whose performance of Tricia's Looking in the Eyes of Love earned a Grammy. A recording artist herself, Tricia's newest CD, The Heart of Dixie, thoughtfully captures the songwriter's view of the South with well-placed lyrics and music reflecting her folk, R & B,and storytelling influences.

Charles Reagan Wilson received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and a PhD in history from the University of Texas in Austin. He came to the University of Mississippi in 1981 and was appointed director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 1998.