People's University: Appalachian Music & Folklore, Overview

August 02, 2016
7:00pm - 7:00pm

Class 1: Appalachian Music -- A Multicultural Overview

In this presentation, Dr. Travis Stimeling (West Virginia University) will present an overview of Appalachia's rich musical traditions, focusing especially on the ways that successive waves of immigration have shaped the sounds of the region's music. Tracing the musical contributions of Appalachia's Native American, Scots-Irish, German, African American, and southern European populations, this presentation suggests that Appalachian music is the product of centuries of intercultural and cross-cultural interactions.

Vocalist Liz Richter, who sings with the Marsh Wheeling String Band, will perform a few of the quintessential Appalachian ballads, including “Pretty Saro,” “Omie Wise,” and “Long Black Veil.” 

Instructor Travis Stimeling (PhD, musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is assistant professor of music history and director of the WVU Bluegrass Band. A scholar of commercial country and Appalachian traditional music, he recently edited The Country Music Reader (Oxford University Press, 2015), an anthology of primary source readings in country music history spanning the late nineteenth century to the present, and is the author of Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene (Oxford University Press, 2011), which earned an American Musicological Society Publication Subvention. He has published articles in such journals as American Music, Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, and Journal of Popular Music Studies, among others. He also served as a Senior Editor for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed. Prior to joining the faculty of WVU, he served on the faculty of Millikin University.

Click Here to hear Dr. Stimeling on Appalachian Music.

The People’s University is a free program for adults who wish to continue their education in the liberal arts, featuring courses taught by experts in each subject that enable patrons to pursue their goal of lifelong learning in subjects such as history, philosophy, and literature. There are no grades and patrons are welcome to attend all or only some programs.