We’re Chloe and Anna, two music history graduate students with vaguely aligned interests in sort-of-recent American popular music and culture. We met at an audition weekend for Samford University’s School of the Arts in 2015, where we became close friends and played music together until we graduated in 2019. Since then, we’ve both pursued masters degrees in musicology. We proofread and discuss each other’s projects so often that our email chains already look like a music history blog, so we felt like we may as well post them.
Chloe Smith
When I was sixteen, my youth orchestra conductor asked me and other students to perform at a ceremony dedicating Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Parkway in Gadsden, Alabama. At that point in my studies as a classical violinist, I was quite unprepared when he presented us with our set list: songs from Bruce Springsteen’s album “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” including the title track “We Shall Overcome,” “Eyes on the Prize,” and “O Mary Don’t You Weep.” I listened to those spirituals-turned-protest songs on repeat, drilling the fiddle solos into my brain in the hopes of being able to recreate them by ear.
It wasn’t until my junior year of college at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama that those songs would come back into my life. I was two years into a violin performance degree and a fresh single semester into my history double major when I was tasked with my first history research project, and I found myself drawn to local music history research topics. I ended up writing about many of those same songs and their journey from slave spirituals sung on antebellum plantations to 1960s protest songs sung on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington. Through the end of my time at Samford and through my masters program at Yale University, my objective has been to tell a story of the United States South through its music. My master’s thesis allowed me to dive into the segregated world of pre-Civil Rights Movement era Birmingham through the jazz artist Sun Ra and his band director John “Fess” Whatley. I used Sun Ra’s music, along with other artists writing about 1963 Birmingham, as a vein into Birmingham’s history of segregation, violence, and Civil Rights protest.
Since finishing my master’s degree, I’ve been living in Birmingham again, working as a violin and piano teacher. In the fall of 2021, I’ll be returning to Yale University to begin my PhD in Music History, with a focus on jazz studies, popular music, and the U.S. South. While I’m not sure where my future research will take me, I know that I’ll continue using music to tell the complicated history of the place I love and call home.
Anna Williams
During my time as a viola performance student at Samford University, I realized that I wanted to do more than just perform. I loved writing program notes and research papers, and I enjoyed spending time in the library more than in the practice room! My coursework in musicology, symphonic literature, and an independent study in feminist and queer musicology led me to choose musicology as my future career. I accepted a teaching assistantship and began my master’s at Arizona State University in 2020, where I have yet to attend a class in person! My TA placements have given me the opportunity to focus on modern music from the history of rock ‘n roll to early hip-hop and its influence on Hamilton.
My coursework so far in graduate school has rekindled my middle-school love of pop-punk and emo music, and I have loved having the opportunity to study them from a scholarly perspective. I never would have imagined myself making a career out of the music I loved as a child. These genres are closely tied to the beginnings of social media and online community, allowing me to also delve into how music and the internet are related in today’s society. My thesis will be about the beginnings of online musical community in the early 2000s among fans of emo. Hopefully one day I can expand this project to examine the online communities of other musical genres as well.
My musical background has been rooted in the Western tradition, which I see as a fundamental flaw with the way our country teaches music. After obtaining my graduate degrees, I intend to write and teach about how we as musicians can bridge the gaps among the many musical cultures that exist in our world. Using the privilege that I undeniably have as a white woman, I will show the next generation of musicians that there is more to music than symphonies and Western art songs, and that different does not mean less valuable.
This blog will feature weekly posts on a variety of music history topics with no promised patterns or themes. We can probably guarantee commentary on American music and culture from the last century up to the present. We’re so excited to share our work, and we hope you enjoy reading!
