Please join us for the 13th Francis Lee Utley Lecture, co-sponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This event is free and open to the public.
Abstract
Archival work is one of the cornerstones of historical research, and for generations, scholars have spent untold hours in these magical and mysterious places as an academic rite of passage. Over the last two decades, however, the rise of the digital humanities has represented a new approach to the archive. Materials that were once accessible only to those with the status, time, and money to travel to specific research locales are now readily available to scholars and the general public alike. The restrictions and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic era have only made the need for open access to digital archives that much more urgent. In this presentation, Dr. Revell Carr, director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, will discuss his participation in initiatives to digitize a wide range of rare and fragile materials relevant to scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines in the arts and humanities, including the English Broadside Ballad Archive and the Cylinder Audio Archive at UC Santa Barbara, the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, and Sounding Spirit, a multi-sited project aimed at digitizing thousands of American sacred songbooks and hymnals.
Bio
James Revell Carr, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American music, studies the importance of travel and commerce in the development of hybrid music and dance cultures. His major interests include sea chanteys, Anglo-American balladry, Hawaiian music, folk music revivals, and improvisational rock.
Carr's first book, Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels (University of Illinois Press, 2014), about the musical exchange between American sailors and Hawaiian musicians in the nineteenth century, was a co-recipient of the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Alan P. Merriam Prize for outstanding book in ethnomusicology for 2015. Carr has articles and reviews in the Journal of American Folklore, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, The Journal of British Studies, American Historical Review and others. He has also published essays in numerous books about The Grateful Dead and their fans, the Deadheads, which will be the topic of his next book.
Before joining University of Kentucky, Dr. Carr was Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he founded the UNCG Old Time Ensemble. Before that he was an Interpretive Specialist Park Ranger at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, an educator at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and curated major exhibits at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Oregon. He was the music supervisor for the English Broadside Ballad Archive, an online database of seventeenth century print ballads funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he can be heard singing many of the ballads to their historically accurate melodies. Dr. Carr served as the president of the Southeastern and Caribbean Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2010-2011, and is currently the chair of the Historical Ethnomusicology Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He presents his work at the conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the Southwest Popular Culture Association, and the International Council for Traditional Music, and other national and international symposia.
