NEH Summer Seminar - College Teachers Study the Blues

This summer 14 college teachers--12 from the United States plus one from Ghana and another from Togo--gathered at the University of Mississippi to study the blues during an eight-week seminar funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The seminar titled "Blues as History, Literature, and Culture" was the third conducted by Center director William Ferris. His other NEH-funded blues seminars took place in 1987 and 1992. Each one has attracted more than 100 inquiries and more than 50 full applications from a diverse pool that included scholars in the fields of literature, history, music, religion, sociology, and American Studies.

Participants studied the blues from its African roots and rural beginnings to its modern electrified urban sound and its tremendous influence on modern American popular music. Participants spent many hours in the University of Mississippi Blues Archive, the world's largest collection of blues materials accessible to researchers. In addition to studying, writing papers, and preparing reports for presentation during seminar meetings, participants met with visiting speakers, attended performances by blues musicians, and took field trips.

Among the speakers this summer were legendary blues singer and gospel disc jockey Reverend "Gatemouth" Moore; poet and literary scholar Jerry Ward, who teaches at Tougaloo College; and David Sanjek, an English professor at Fordham University and coauthor of American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century. Other speakers included blues archivist Edward Komara; music promoter Dick Waterman; David Evans, record producer and professor of music at the University of Memphis; David Nelson, editor, and Jim O'Neal, founding editor, of Living Blues magazine. Some sites visited during field trips were the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi; the Delta Cultural Center in Helena, Arkansas; and Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee.

1995 Blues Seminar Participants

Contents