About us
The AMS South-Central chapter includes the states of Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Members include professors, independent scholars, students, and those who love music history. If you are a member of the national American Musicological Society and live within the zip codes of our area (as determined by the national office), you are a member of our chapter. All are welcome to attend the annual chapter meetings. We do not charge chapter dues, but there is a conference fee at the chapter meeting.
Our Spring 2014 chapter conference will be held at Eastern Kentucky University on March 21-22. Details available now via links on the left.
Dale Cockrell, Professor of Musicology (Emeritus) at Vanderbilt University and author of Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (1997, Cambridge University Press; recipient of Hugh Holman Award for best book in Southern Studies) will be our Keynote Speaker. A reception will follow his lecture in the Grand Reading Room of the John Grant Crabbe Library.
The activities on Friday will also include an exhibit of music instruments made by Appalachian native, Bluegrass musician, and renown Luthier Homer Ledford (EKU Alumnus, 1954) and our concert Friday evening features The Raleigh Dailey Trio. His newly released CD by llama records, What Happened Next, presents nine new original tunes by this exciting trio of Raleigh Dailey (piano), Danny Cecil (bass), and Paul Deatherage (percussion).
Ron Pen, director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, will deliver a brief introduction to the exhibit of instruments crafted by noted luthier Homer Ledford. Pen served as editor and wrote the foreword and Afterword of the second edition of Dulcimer Maker: The Craft of Homer Ledford (University Press of Kentucky 2003). He was involved in the making of the documentary film The Dulcimer Craft of Homer Ledford (Kentucky Educational Television 2004). The presentation will also include a short excerpt of the KET film on Ledford.