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Ole Miss Field School Examined Local Religious Music
A field school for cultural documentation was held at the University of Mississippi, from May 12 through May 23. It provided 11 Ole Miss students with training in professional techniques used to document aspects of living traditional culture, as well as to organize and preserve the documentary materials they create. The specific focus of the field school’s research was various forms of religious music found in north Mississippi, including gospel music.
The field school was cosponsored by the University’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the American Music Archive at the Ford Center, and the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C. It is based on a model developed by the Folklife Center, which has previously sponsored numerous field schools in partnership with colleges and universities around the country. This was the second field school at Ole Miss. The field school first took place last year.
During the first half of the field school, participants learned about a variety of subjects through lectures, discussions, demonstrations, and hands-on workshops. The subjects included research ethics, project planning, interviewing techniques, writing field notes and tape logs, operating recording equipment, and organizing sound recordings and other documentary materials created in the field. During the second half of the course, the participants organized into teams and proceeded with supervised field research using the techniques learned during the first half. The student researchers interviewed residents of north Mississippi who provided insight into the region’s religious music as it exists now and as it existed in the past. They tried to seek out such people as choir directors, choir members, organists and other instrumentalists, composers, radio DJs, and CD producers who specialize in religious music, as well as members of the clergy.
At the conclusion of the field school, the recorded interviews, fieldnotes, and other documentary material created by the participants will become part of the American Music Archive, housed at the University Library’s Department of Archives and Special Collections, where they will complement other collections concerning Mississippi’s traditional musical heritage.
The principal faculty members during the field school were David Wharton, of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and Guha Shankar, Michael Taft, and David A. Taylor, of the American Folklife Center. The students who received training were Rebecca Batey, Camp Best, Erin Boles, Cortez Castilla, Eric Feldman, Matt Hopper, Jennifer Lawrence, Aaron Rollins, Sarah Simonson, Stacey Smith, and Mary Warner.
Created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress to “preserve and present American folklife,” the American Folklife Center conducts programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference service, live performance, lectures, exhibitions, publications, and training. The Center’s archive, which was established at the Library of Congress in 1928, is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world. For more information about the field school for cultural documentation, contact David Wharton at 662-915-5993.
Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing for Mississippi High School Students
Each year the Center gives the Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing to two Mississippi high school students for short stories and poetry written during the previous school year. First place carries a prize of $500, and second place a prize of $250.
Schools may submit one entry in each category. Faculty of the University of Mississippi’s English Department judge the entries; the awards are presented during the University’s annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.
Stella Day Nickerson of Aberdeen is this year’s first-place winner for her short story “My Candle Burns.” Nickerson is an English student of Emma Richardson’s at the Mississippi School for Math and Science in Columbus.
Frederick Stacy Parker of Natchez is this year’s second-place winner for his poem “Letting Go.” Parker is an A.P. English student of Jean Biglane’s at Cathedral High School in Natchez.
The 2008 winners and their teachers and parents are invited to the awards presentation, which will take place on Sunday, July 20, the opening day of the 35th Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The late Frances Patterson of Tupelo, a longtime member of the Center Advisory Committee, established and endowed the awards, which are selected through a competition held in high schools throughout Mississippi.
SALLY CASSADY LYON
