Musicology Now Welcomes Christopher J. Smith

Musicology Now is pleased to welcome Christopher J. Smith to our editorial team. Smith is Professor, Chair of Musicology, and director of the Vernacular Music Center at the Texas Tech University School of Music. His research interests are in African-American Music, 20th Century Music, Irish traditional music and other vernaculars, improvisation, music and politics, and historical performance. He records and tours with Altramar medieval music ensemble, the Irish traditional band Last Night’s Fun, the Juke Band (pre-WWII blues and jazz), and the pan-European Balfolk group Rattleskull.  His full-length theatrical dance show Dancing at the Crossroads premiered in February 2013 and his scholarly monograph, The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois), was the winner of the Irving Lowens award from the Society for American Music in 2013.  Smith's new monograph for Illinois is Movement Revolutions: Bodies, Spaces, and Noise in American Cultural History (2019). He is the Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Vernacular Music Center, directs the TTU Celtic Ensemble, and arranges for and conducts the Elegant Savages Orchestra symphonic folk group at Texas Tech. He is a former nightclub bouncer, framing carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.