Christopher J. Smith

Christopher J Smith is Professor of Musicology and founding director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University, where he teaches courses in American, vernacular, and 20^th century musics and directs the Tech Folk Orchestra. He holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Boston (BA, and the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (MM Jazz Studies, Ph.D. Musicology).  He has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Indiana University, and as a guest lecturer at University College Cork, the University of Limerick, the Dundalk Institute of Technology, and CESMECA graduate school in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. At Texas Tech, he has been the recipient of numerous awards for teaching, research, service, global engagement, inclusive excellence, scholarly monograph, and institutional leadership.

His research interests are in American and African-American Music, 20th Century Music, oral-tradition music and dance idioms, improvisation, music and politics, and performance practice. He teaches courses in American, 20th century, and African Diasporic musics, as well as vernacular, world music, and ethnomusicology topics, intercultural learning, arts practice research, and community arts entrepreneurship.

In addition to the Vernacular Music Center, he directs the Berkshire Folk Theater and the Tech Folk Orchestra. He has three times served as 4-year appointed External Examiner for the educational programs at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, and continues service as External Examiner for PhD dissertations at institutions in the USA, UK, Ireland, and the EU, and for the Irish government’s music program accreditation bureau.

He is the author of numerous essays and book chapters, in addition to over 190 keynotes, talks, and peer-reviewed presentations. His award-winning monographs are The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois, 2013) and Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois, 2019); his next books are Sounding History (with Thomas Irvine), The Teacher’s Guide to Arts Practice Research in the College Classroom (Routledge), and Situational Genius: The Practice of the American Bandleaders (Illinois, 2025).

He has presented papers at the national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the New England Historical Association, the Society for American Music, the Sustainability in Teaching and Research Symposium, the American Musicological Society, College Music Society, RIdIM Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale, the International Society for the Study of Popular Music, the Narrative Society, the American Council for Irish Studies, the Society for Musicology in Ireland, the Society for Seventeenth Century Music, the Historical Fictions Research Conference, the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, American Nineteenth Century History, the Dance Studies Association, the Political Forum Bern, the String Band Summit, Narrascope, the Conference on the Arts in Society, the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, the Percussive Arts Society, Soundscapes in the Early Modern World, the North American British Music Studies Association, Infrastructures of Musical Globalization, Agents and Actors: Networks in Music History, the Film and History Society, the Stage and Screen Conference, the Southern American Studies Association, and the LYRICA Society for Text and Music Studies, and many other scholarly societies.

In addition, he recorded and toured internationally with Altramar medieval music ensemble (7 CDs to date on the Dorian Group label) and with RattleSkull (Euro-French Balfolk dance music) and has lectured or performed at hundreds of colloquia, concerts, workshops, and pub sessions across the Continent and in Europe, and on National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Fox Network nationwide. He was the traditional-music consultant for noted composer Dan Welcher’s Minstrels of the Kells and toured that piece in China as soloist with the University of Kentucky Wind Symphony, formerly served on the International Advisory Board for the Naxos World record label and Flatlands Dance Theatre, was co-Director of the TTU Symposium of World Musics and Southwest Early Music, and serves as co-director of the TTU Arts Practice Research conference and The Electric Guitar in American Culture conference (both biennial).

He is the composer, librettist, and musical director of the full-length theatrical dance show Dancing at the Crossroads: A Celebration of African American and Anglo-Celtic Dance in the New World, which premiered in February 2013; the “folk oratorio” Plunder: Battling for Democracy in the New World (2016); and the full-length immersive theatrical show Yonder, a collaboration with the historic Wallace Theater in Levelland, TX (2020). His original scores for the TTU Theater & Dance department’s productions of Brecht’s Mother Courage, Our Country’s Good, and (in collaboration with Roger Landes) Much Ado About Nothing three times received the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival’s Meritorious Achievement Award. His co-composed an original chamber-orchestral score for the classic silent horror film Nosferatu (1922) commissioned by the Flatland Film Festival in 2015. He formerly served as a lead artist, music director, and house composer for the Bassanda Project, a movement & music collaboration with contemporary dance choreographer Nicole Wesley (Texas State University). He is producer, co-host, and showrunner for the podcasts SOUNDING HISTORY and VOICES FROM THE VERNACULAR MUSIC CENTER, and has performed and written about contemporary and historical vernacular musics of North, West, and South Africa; the Caribbean; India; the Mediterranean; medieval Europe; and the American South. He has studied and concertized in all these styles on acoustic, electric, and slide guitar; oud; lute; saz; kamelengoni; banjos; button accordions; and percussion. His speculative fiction, set in the “Multiverse of Bassanda,” is housed at www.smithscribe.substack.com.

He is also a former nightclub bouncer, line cook, carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.

Find more about Chris Smith, including a full professional vita and an array of weblinks, at https://linktr.ee/drchrissmith.