MURFREESBORO — Music journalist Barry Mazor will focus on Ralph Peer’s pioneering
role in bringing the recording, marketing and publishing of blues, jazz,
country, gospel and Latin music to the world in a special Monday, Jan. 26,
lecture at MTSU’s Center for Popular Music.
The
free public discussion is set for 4:30 p.m. in Room 160 of the College of
Education Building on the MTSU campus. A searchable campus map of MTSU, complete with parking
details, is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParking14-15.
Mazor’s newest book,
"Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music," is the first
biography of the adventurous A&R man for Victor Records who discovered Jimmie
Rodgers and the Carter Family at the famed “Bristol Sessions” in East Tennessee
in 1927.
Peer, who later
founded the world's largest independent music publishing firm known today as
PeerMusic, also played a role in recording Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues,” which
first popularized the blues in 1920. He helped bring Latin American music to
the forefront during World War II and revolutionized popular music in the
postwar era by pushing regional music to the nation and publishing
million-sellers recorded by artists ranging from Bing Crosby to Buddy Holly.
Mazor, who also is
the author of "Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music
Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century,” is a longtime music, media and
business journalist. He has written for the Wall Street Journal and No
Depression magazine, and his writing also has appeared in the Oxford American, The
Washington Post, the Village Voice, Nashville Scene, American Songwriter and
the Journal of Country Music.
American roots music is a specialty of MTSU’s Center for Popular Music, which was
established in 1985 by the Tennessee Board of Regents as one of 16 Centers of
Excellence across the TBR system. It’s devoted to the study and scholarship of
popular music in America, and its staff maintains a unique archive of research
materials that spans shaped-note songbooks to hip-hop mash-ups in a collection
stretching from the early 18th century to the present.
The Center for Popular Music also develops
and sponsors programs in American vernacular music and regularly presents
special concerts, lectures and events for the campus community.
For more
information on the Jan. 26 lecture at MTSU, email the Center for Popular Music
at popular.music@mtsu.edu.
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