|
View the H-Southern-Music Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Southern-Music's December 2005 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Southern-Music's December 2005 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Southern-Music home page.
(Editor’s Note—This is the second in a series of reflective narratives written by members of the H-Southern-Music Advisory Board. Professor Kathy Ogren received her doctorate in history from The Johns Hopkins University. She is currently Director of the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies and Virginia C. Hunsaker Chair in Distinguished Teaching at The University of Redlands. In 1989, Oxford University Press published _The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz_, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 1990. Below is Professor Ogren's account of how she came to view music, and particularly jazz, as a vital component in her teaching and research endeavors. We at H-Southern-Music welcome the feedback of list members to Ogren's commentary). As a baby boomer born in 1955, raised on rock and roll and folk music, I know I came of age believing that music spoke for my generation and American culture generally. I started listening carefully to the blues because of Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin—these white women led me to appreciate the African American roots of jazz and blues. In graduate school, a number of texts then influenced me to write about jazz and blues, starting, (not surprisingly) with Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, Langston Hughes’ poetry, and F.Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age short stories. As I studied these works in graduate school, I wondered what the title “jazz age” really signified about the decade of the 1920s. That was the starting point that led me to research and write _The Jazz Revolution_. Fortunately, I had enthusiastic support from Dr. Ronald G. Walters who was also interested in the importance of popular culture on American history. I set the radio dial to a jazz radio station at Morgan State University at the time, too. The lyrical prose in Sidney Bechet’s "Treat it Gentle," the wonderful stories in Nat Hentoff’s _Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya_, and Ishmael Reed’s novel _Mumbo Jumbo_ all inspired me to look for broad connections between music and American culture. As the field of jazz studies grows in recent years, I have particularly appreciated the scholarship of Eric Lott, Hazel Carby, Scott DeVeaux, Robert G. O’Meally, Lewis Erenberg, and William Kenney. Each of these writers has helped me learn how to see how the early narratives of jazz and blues history can be questioned and re-conceptualized. Once I began teaching full time here at The University of Redlands, I realized my students also embrace music as a generational identity like I did; music is a central language for the expression of their evolving identities and values. I saw how valuable music scholarship could be in the classroom since it reaches a wide variety of learners. I teach some seminars focused specifically on music, such as “Jazz and Blues Literature,” but I always bring musical texts, films, analysis and criticism into all my courses. Students sometimes struggle with what they perceive as an academic perspective on music and culture preferring to uncritically celebrate their favorite styles and performers. So I like to use essays by writers like Gerald Early and George Lipsitz to stir up unexpected ideas about the broad resonance of music and culture with my classes. In recent years, I have started a new area of research into cowboy and western poetry and music. I was drawn to this work by the musical quality of cowboy poets like Paul Zarzyski and musicians Ian Tyson and Tom Russell. This is not a very popular genre with our students here, but I have a great time pushing them to move outside their comfort zones into new cross-cultural possibilities. We now have hip hoppers who have opened their minds to the cadences of contemporary cowboy poetry. In short, I draw my influences from the music, the books, and my students. Next spring I will offer a class tentatively entitled American Music cultures that will be negotiated with students in our Johnston Center for Integrative Studies. We’ll focus on jazz and blues, country music, cowboy-western music, and rock and roll, but I expect the students to bring their own cultural affinities to the table. Kathy Ogren
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|