The Music of the South Conference will be held today and tomorrow and will give attendants the opportunity to participate in talks centered around the music of the American South.
Musicians, scholars and other active participants in the modern music world will gather today and tomorrow on The University of Mississippi campus and around Oxford for the 2013 Music of the South Conference.
The conference’s events are sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Living Blues Magazine, the Blues Archive, the Ford Center and the Future of the South Endowment.
Ted Ownby, professor of history at Ole Miss and director for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, said that the theme this year is innovation and experimentation in music, and that the culture of the South will be examined through the lens of music theory.
“The conference will answer the question of where innovation in music comes from, but also the question of whether the South’s existing and much celebrated types of music sometimes work against innovation,” Ownby said.
The conference will start at 10 a.m. today on the third floor of the J.D. Williams Library. This first event will give attendants an opportunity to hear about new additions to the archive and to view materials from the Field School for Cultural Documentation, a project of the Library of Congress.
Topics that will be discussed throughout the two-day conference include cultural tourism, popular musicians and southern traditions.
The conference will also evaluate race, history and music in the South, African American gospel quartets, Southern roots music and Swamp Sista culture. Other topics of discussion include music and the creative economy as well as creativity and its sources.
Mark Camarigg, publications manager at Living Blues Magazine, said that some events that might be particularly interesting to students, such as a Brown Bag lecture by music producer and sound engineer Mark Neill, scheduled for today at noon at the Barnard Observatory.
Neill co-produced the “Brothers” album by the Black Keys and will talk about famous recording studios in the South.
Valerie June, a Memphis-based female blues musician, will perform at the Ford Center at 7 p.m. tonight.
“She’s at a point in her career where she won’t really be doing these types of shows anymore,” Camarigg said.
“So it’s a good chance to see her in a more intimate setting than you’re really ever going to see her.”
Another event exploring New Orleans’ hip-hop culture will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday in the Blues Archive on the third floor of the library.
“The speaker is an expert on what’s happening in the New Orleans hip-hop scene and how that differentiates it from other rap scenes in the South,” Camarigg said.
The schedule also includes a film and several opportunities to hear live music both in the library and elsewhere. Thacker Mountain Radio will be hosting a special show in concordance with the conference on Thursday evening.
“After looking over what’s going on here, I’m glad that this is being done because if people don’t do things like this, it will be forgotten,” said Silas Reed, Ole Miss senior and local frontman of the band Silas Reed N’ Da Books.
A full schedule of events can be found on the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s website.
