Southern Sounds: Our Music & Culture

In Collaboration with Carteret Community College

This seminar will feature two scholars exploring one of the great cultural contributions of the South: our music!

UNC Professor of Music Jocelyn Neal will present Song of the South:  Assimilation and Secession in Today’s Country and Bluegrass Music
The musical heritage and present day musical practices of the American South are a treasure trove for exploring how Southern culture interfaces with mainstream American popular culture.  We will look at bluegrass and country in the present to consider how those musics balance assimilation with the constant tension to separate themselves as distinct genres and traditions, and how those impulses are part of a long tradition.

Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Bland Simpson, will present  A Sound Country Serenade: Words & Music from King Mackerel and Other Works.  Bland Simpson has collaborated on a dozen musicians’ theatre shows and has written a number of lyrical books about coastal and sound country North Carolina, work that has overlapped most noticeably in the popular musical King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running:  Songs & Stories of the Carolina Coast.  He will discuss and perform songs from this and other shows and read from his books as well.

Tuition: Lecture & Lunch, featuring a four-course meal at the CCC Culinary Cafe on campus, $40. Lectures Only: $25

Register at the CCC Foundation Website.