Musicology

“The Ghost of Tom Joad” is a song that spans American literature and music history: It was written by Bruce Springsteen for a 1995 album, but it was inspired by “The Ballad of Tom Joad” by folk musician Woodie Guthrie. And Guthrie was inspired by the 1939 book by John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

So it’s a song that embodies decades of social consciousness in America -

This song took on new meaning when the band Rage Against the Machine covered it, transforming the song’s message of “no home, no job, no peace, no rest” from the dust bowl era to the hard-driving grunge sound of early-2000s Los Angeles.

Ian Chang is Stephanie’s guest this episode - he’s a musician and DJ who was born in Hong Kong, spent time as a kid in the UK, and California - and Ian and I met at a party and bonded over our memories of Top of the Pops and Boyz 2 Men.

In this conversation Stephanie and her guest debates these two versions of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” - and use it as a jumping off point to talk about everything from Mavis to Van Halen.

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Cover Story is a podcast that uncovers the covers — that is, the stories, meanings, and histories behind our most classic songs. Each episode features host and musicologist Stephanie Shonekan and one guest. Together they take one classic song, two popular renditions, and discuss: Who did it better, and why?

This season’s episodes feature The Four Tops vs. Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen vs. Rage Against the Machine, Ken Boothe vs. Bread, Otis Redding vs. Aretha Franklin, and Fantasia Barrino vs. Cynthia Erivo.

This is a show about the music we love. But the conversations uncover intimate stories about our own personal connections with the songs. Cover Story with Stephanie Shonekan reconnects us with great music and the diverse perspectives, histories, and identities of the artists and the fans who enjoy that music.

Cover Story with Stephanie Shonekan is produced by Janet Saidi, Ryan Famuliner, Aaron Hay, and Stephanie Shonekan. This season was edited by Aaron Hay and Ryan Famuliner.

This podcast is a collaboration between KBIA and Vox Magazine, with funding from the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities, MU’s College of Arts & Science, and the Missouri School of Journalism.  

You can follow the podcast and other special projects on Twitter at @VoxMag, and @KBIA, and on Instagram at @voxmagazine and @kbianews. 

“Cover Story with Stephanie Shonekan” Season 1 was produced by Janet Saidi, Kristofor Husted, Fernando Narro, Rehman Tungekar, and Ryan Famuliner, with host and producer Stephanie Shonekan. Season One was edited by Rehman Tungekar and Ryan Famuliner.

By: Ashawnta Jackson

In a recently released interactive project—the Timeline of African American Music—Carnegie Hall, in collaboration with ethnomusicologist Portia K. Maultsby, has charted the histories, traditions, sounds, and communities that have made Black music such a vital part of American culture. Charting movements from Afrofuturism to ragtime, funk to work songs, the project doesn’t just represent the history of the music, it also represents a coming together of some of nearly thirty notable scholars in music and cultural studies.

The timeline, according to the project’s website, “​​reveals the unique characteristics of each genre and style, while also offering in-depth studies of pioneering musicians who created some of America’s most timeless artistic expressions.” Those unique characteristics can be as familiar as the sounds of rock or blues or come from genres that reveal Black artists thriving and creating in spaces that, as musicologist Tammy Kernodle writes, “expand the palette for what has come to define sonic Blackness.”

In this series, we explore the work of some of the scholars involved in the project, highlighting their scholarship that can be found in the JSTOR archives.

Tammy Kernodle is a music professor at Miami University in Ohio, where she primarily focuses on African American music, American music, and gender studies. In an essay she contributed to the Timeline, Kernodle explores a genre of music that is often excluded from discussions of Black music—concert or classical music. Though the names of Black classical composers are not always part of the conversation, Kernodle argues that not only should they be, but that Black concert or Afro-classical music has a long tradition spanning from the Colonial Era (1619–1775) to the present day. Composers such as the formerly enslaved Newport Gardner or singer Matilda Sissieretta Jones weren’t just part of the genre; their work was an essential “form of resistance culture to notions of racial inferiority, and the marginalization of Black America,” Kernodle explains.

Continuing the theme of music as resistance is Stephanie Shonekan in an essay that charts the sounds of protest. An ethnomusicologist and Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, Shonekan explores the intersections of music, culture, and identity. Music has shaped Black life from slavery to the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, Shonekan writes, and “has served as the inspirational soundtrack of these movements, evolving from one era to another, and reflecting their revolutionary response to each new challenge for justice, progress, and equality.” Music, she argues, is a vital part of protest and “it is only when the world truly listens, commits to the work of change, that sustainable resolution is possible.”

Explore the work of both Tammy Kernodle and Stephanie Shonekan:

Tammy Kernodle

• Arias, Communists, and Conspiracies: The History of Still’s “Troubled Island”
• This Is My Story, This Is My Song: The Historiography of Vatican II, Black Catholic Identity, Jazz, and the Religious Compositions of Mary Lou Williams
• Diggin’ You Like Those Ol’ Soul Records: Meshell Ndegeocello and the Expanding Definition of Funk in Postsoul America
• Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of Validation

Stephanie Shonekan

• Fela’s Foundation: Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Market Women’s Movement in 1940s Western Nigeria
• Epilogue: “We People Who Are Darker than Blue”: Black Studies and the Mizzou Movement

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Arias, Communists, and Conspiracies: The History of Still’s “Troubled Island”By: Tammy L. KernodleThe Musical Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Winter 1999), pp. 487–508Oxford University Press

 This Is My Story, This Is My Song: The Historiography of Vatican II, Black Catholic Identity, Jazz, and the Religious Compositions of Mary Lou WilliamsBy: Tammy Lynn KernodleU.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 19, No. 2, African American Spirituality and Liturgical Renewal (Spring 2001), pp. 83–94Catholic University of America Press

 Diggin’ You Like Those Ol’ Soul Records: Meshell Ndegeocello and the Expanding Definition of Funk in Postsoul AmericaBy: Tammy L. KernodleAmerican Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, THE FUNK ISSUE (2013), pp. 181–204Mid-America American Studies Association

 Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of ValidationBy: Tammy L. KernodleBlack Music Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 27–55Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press

 Fela’s Foundation: Examining the Revolutionary Songs of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Abeokuta Market Women’s Movement in 1940s Western NigeriaBy: Stephanie ShonekanBlack Music Research Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 127–144Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press

 Epilogue: “We People Who Are Darker than Blue”: Black Studies and the Mizzou MovementBy: Stephanie ShonekanThe Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 86, No. 3, Special Issue—When Voices Rise: Race, Resistance, and Campus Uprisings in the Information Age (Summer 2017), pp. 399–404Journal of Negro Education

By Sala Levin ’10 

Feb 17, 2022

She may not have the brown fedora, khaki pants or whip, but even so, University of Maryland School of Music Professor Barbara Haggh-Huglo is in many ways the Indiana Jones of medieval musicology. She’s traveled from Belgium to Italy to Mexico searching archives and libraries for traces of forgotten centuries-old music, and has unearthed revelations that have changed what musicologists know about landmark composers.

Since publishing her first article in 1981, on German radio drama of the 1950s and ’60s, Haggh-Huglo has been exploring unknown corners of music history and theory, uncovering secrets about music and musicians that have rocked the musicology world. This spring, in a talk to the Belgian Academy of Sciences, she’ll present her groundbreaking research on a long-lived chant by a monumental composer, and push for an expansive series of concerts featuring that chant, choral music and pipe organ music across northwest Europe, which she hopes will direct funds toward the renovation of historic churches.

In recognition of the contributions Haggh-Huglo has made to her field, in November she was elected an honorary member of the American Musicological Society, the highest honor bestowed by the preeminent organization for musicologists, who study the history and theory of music.

Her interest in music and its history began early on. Haggh-Huglo’s father was a composer and music theorist who eventually became director of the University of Nebraska’s School of Music, and her mother was a trained singer. Her sister became a professional cellist, and while Haggh-Huglo played violin, her academic nature steered her toward musicology.

It wasn’t just her birth family that was immersed in music. Her late husband, Michel Huglo, was an esteemed musicologist who began his adult life as a monk in France’s Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, famed for its study and practice of Gregorian chant. Though separated in age by 34 years, the two found common ground in their passion for the music of the past, and traveled across the globe together in search of the next great find. “We worked in libraries side by side and what I learned from him was of incalculable value,” she said.

Haggh-Huglo made her first game-changing discovery during research for her doctoral dissertation on the history of music in Brussels. After learning Dutch and French in order to read primary sources, she found music by renowned 15th-century choral composer Guillaume Du Fay. He’d written it in the entirely different style of Gregorian chant, the only such chant by a major composer of choral music. It’s this revelation that she now hopes will spur a new series of concerts in Europe.

Other musical discoveries have taken her to major sights around the world—including Buckingham Palace, where she met with Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary to present research on music commissioned for Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, an ancestor of the queen.

Haggh-Huglo uses a contemporary perspective to reflect on a musical world that can feel distant, said Rachel Ruisard Ph.D. ’21, who studied with her at UMD and now teaches musicology at Haverford College. Haggh-Huglo encouraged Ruisard to write her thesis on women’s songs from the 14th century, said Ruisard.

“She was really advocating for how important this topic was to talk about, because in the current discipline for this tradition, perspectives of women and considerations of gender really are not often discussed,” she said.

Still teaching courses on early music, its notation and theory, Haggh-Huglo finds refuge in a variety of music, including her new pipe organ kick. “I’ve learned the organ repertory in the car on the way to work,” she said. “That’s what’s gotten me through the pandemic.”