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Greetings, folks, from your Museum Exhibit Review and CD Review Editor. I typically start my academic biography with a childhood memory: when I was growing up, my mom would bathe my sisters and I, and my dad would sit on the toilet seat and sing to us, mostly songs that were then popular with folk movement and the New Left. The New Left lived in my house, literally: I grew up in San Francisco in the late 60s and my parents ran the Teen Club at our local Catholic Church. Teen Club kids were at my house constantly, babysitting me (my sisters and I all have godparents who were once those hippie babysitters) and teaching my father songs from Peter, Paul and Mary; Jefferson Airplane (we have the original album - when I bought my father the CD version, he missed the record skips he was used to hearing); and many, many others. Fast forward to graduate school where I had dropped music in favor of history because it seemed more lucrative, my father and I spent one evening after my first semester at the University of Kansas, drinking several bottles of red wine and recording our first duet album, called "Songs My Father Sang Me in the Bathtub." My Ph.D. work (Ph.D, Indiana, 2000) has focused on the ways that women contributed to the professionalization and nationalization of country music on the radio (called barn dances - the Grand Ole Opry, as you know, is a legacy) in the 1930s and 1940s. The work is still under review by a publisher, but is a collective biography of 6 women who mark important transitions in the music and business, including Lily May Ledford, Minnie Pearl and Rose Lee Maphis. Ironically, the music I study now includes songs my dad sang to me when I was a kid since 1930s country music became the folk music of the New Left, sung in search of a genuine life that had been buried in mass consumption, an overwhelming governmental bureaucracy and the corporate greed of the 1950s and 1960s. I continue to use music in a variety of ways in the classroom, but am moving into new research on rituals of death in the South during the Great Depression. This new work was suggested by the radio fans who wrote barn dance stars continuously, not necessarily about death (although there are lovely letters of condolence to John Lair after his star performer, Linda Parker, died in 1935), but about their lives and what was important to them during the Great Depression. Best, Kristine M. McCusker Middle Tennessee State University
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