A behind-the-scenes view of the many hands involved in bringing Eileen Southern’s story to light.

By Christina Linklater, Curator of the Isham Memorial Library and Houghton Special Collections Cataloger

“What’s Harvard doing for the 50th anniversary of Eileen Southern’s The Music of Black Americans?”

That question, posed to Keeper of the Isham Memorial Library and Houghton Music Cataloger Christina Linklater by another attendee at the 2018 meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS), sparked an idea that would lead to the Eileen Southern Initiative, a multi-year collaboration that has reached across departments and repositories, drawing in librarians and archivists, graduate and undergraduate students, community members and Professor Southern’s family members. Three years and one pandemic later, a digital exhibit is drawing in visitors, oral histories have been captured for future scholarship, and more events are on the horizon to recognize Professor Southern and her invaluable work.

Back on campus after that conference, Christina ran into the chair of Harvard’s Department of Music and repeated the question to her. “Nothing yet, I don’t think,” came the reply, “but you should ask Braxton and Carol.” Professors Carol Oja and Braxton Shelley, musicologists with a shared interest in American music, agreed that The Music of Black Americans should be celebrated in its golden anniversary year.

A genre-disrupting book covering four centuries of African and African American music history, The Music of Black Americans was published in 1971, is now in its third edition and has never been out of print. Its author, Eileen Southern, would in 1976 become the first Black woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The story of Professor Southern’s extraordinary scholarship, luminous career, and difficult yet joyous life came to captivate all three initial collaborators, who, along with interested graduate students Alexander W. Cowan and Ganavya Doraiswamy, convened in late 2018 at the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library to share ideas.

That the Music Library has always been an integral partner in the Eileen Southern Initiative was due to Christina’s fascination with the book, and to an initial plan to focus on mounting an in-person library exhibit dedicated to Professor Southern and her legacy, with curation by students in seminars taught by Professors Oja and Shelley (Professor Shelley recently joined the faculty of Yale University).

In September 2019, the first seminar began: Professor Oja’s AmCiv 201, Classic Texts and Recent Trends in American Music Scholarship. Students were charged with choosing Harvard Library materials for the exhibit, and with filling in Professor Southern’s biography by conducting oral history interviews with those who knew her, or were inspired by her, at the 2019 AMS meeting. To support these endeavors, Harvard Library selected Christina and Professor Oja for an S.T. Lee Innovation Grant, a program intended to “fund creative partnerships between Harvard faculty and Harvard Library staff that improve access to information.” The grant provided funding for AmCiv 201 to hire videographer Nicholas Natale, who filmed them as they interviewed such luminaries of American musicology as Marva Carter, Josephine Wright and Tammy Kernodle. The grant also enabled the Eileen Southern Initiative to commission closed captions for the resulting videos, ensuring access for all to this important testimony.

Over the summer of 2020, two additional fellowships furnished crucial assistance for the interviews: Hannah Ezer ’22, Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP) Fellow, created alternative text to ensure that the digital images of the online exhibit could be appreciated more widely; and Sharri Hall, PhD candidate in the Department of Music, held a Pforzheimer Fellowship that paid for her creation of the metadata that will accompany the videos when they are submitted to Harvard’s Digital Repository Service. Sharri also contributed to the design of the digital exhibit and conducted research for oral history interviews, and Hannah created an inventory of the musical examples in The Music of Black Americans — which would inspire Music Library staff members Kerry Masteller and Sandi-Jo Malmon to create a digital appendix for the book.

Early in that first Eileen Southern semester, AmCiv 201 was captivated by the collection of personal papers that Professor Southern gave to the Harvard University Archives upon her retirement in 1986. Generously welcomed by Archives staff members Ginny Hunt, Robin McElheny and Ross Mulcare, the students explored the papers in one group visit and several follow-up visits as individuals. As they worked through the materials, it quickly became apparent that the dominant narrative — which marginalized Professor Southern as a minor figure in Harvard’s history — was not as convincing as the emerging picture of a powerful and imaginative scholar with an enormous global network of professional and personal contacts.

All of the students’ work may be seen in Eileen Southern and The Music of Black Americans, an expansive digital exhibit showcasing the Harvard Library items the students discovered — as well as those they created: the 20 richly engaging oral history portraits, which will soon be deposited into the Archives. Designer Cara Buzzell was engaged to create the digital exhibit, with funds supplied by a Barajas Dean’s Innovation Grant; the exhibit was realized by Katie Callam, a postdoctoral fellow at the Fellowships & Writing Center of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The digital exhibit will have an in-person component in January 2022, when the Loeb Music Library presents Eileen Southern’s Story in its Richard F. French Gallery: containing the objects whose digital surrogates are presented on the digital exhibit, it is true to the original vision of the AmCiv 201 students, who had not initially been invited to consider a digital component to their work. Three students, though, went ahead and built a digital resource on their own: Jewel Pereyra (PhD candidate in the American Studies program), Christopher Benham and Siriana Lundgren (PhD candidates in the Department of Music) worked with data visualization experts at Lamont Library’s Multimedia Lab to create Mapping Eileen Southern’s Global Networks, an ArcGIS StoryMap showing just how far Professor Southern’s influence reached in her lifetime.

The digital exhibit is now under the stewardship of Harvard University Archives, which will capture new iterations as items and information are added.

On November 15th, 2021, Eileen Southern and The Music of Black Americans was unveiled at a virtual symposium dedicated to sharing and building on Professor Southern’s impact. Entitled Black Women and the American University: Eileen Southern’s Story, the symposium was hosted by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and drew over 500 attendees, including Professor Southern’s granddaughter and her son, who joined remotely thanks to a collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Zoeberlein, historian at the Mid-County Regional Branch of the Port Charlotte Public Library in Florida, who arranged a public screening.

A follow-up online event, Black Music and the American University, is planned for April 2022 and will be sonically illustrated by a concert in Sanders Theatre in which the Aeolians, a renowned choir from HBCU Oakwood University in Alabama, will partner with the Harvard Choruses to perform newly commissioned works by Rosephanye Powell and Marques L.A. Garrett.

Resources at the Loeb Music Library and Harvard University Archives are the foundation on which the Eileen Southern Initiative was built and continues to grow. Materials at both repositories are available to all, regardless of affiliation or status, and Archives and Loeb Music staff will continue to strive to meet the needs of researchers, whether local or remote.