Christopher J. Smith

PhD Musicology, Indiana University Bloomington Jacobs School of Music

Email: christopher.smith@ttu.edu
Phone: 806.834.2775
Office: School of Music, Room 218

Christopher J. Smith is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University. He holds the PhD in Musicology from Indiana University (1999) and has been a working musician since his teens. His scholarship investigates the vernacular roots and transmission processes of expressive culture around the globe. The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (University of Illinois Press, 2013; Lowens Award) reads paintings, notation, topography, archives, and demographic evidence to reconstruct the sound and movement of Afro-Caribbean and Anglo-Celtic exchange on Atlantic waterfronts before minstrelsy. Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois, 2019) operates across a similarly wide range of sources and across the history of the Republic from the Great Awakenings to Stonewall and hip hop, to conceive participatory street dance as political action. His third Illinois monograph, From Count Basie to Questlove: The Practice of the American Bandleaders (2027), theorizes "situational genius," as a learnable craft by which leaders from gospel to funk precipitate ensemble creativity; it extends the analysis of collaborative improvisation he has pursued for three decades. Further projects include Sounding History (with Thomas Irvine), on the interplay of music, climate, colonialism, and empire; and The Teacher's Guide to Arts Practice-Based Research in the College Classroom (Routledge, with Rita Kundu Little), a subject he has pioneered in North American academia.

His creative work extends the same inquiry to the stage and the page. He composed and directed the theatrical dance show Dancing at the Crossroads, co-composed the "folk oratorio" Plunder! Battling for Democracy in the New World and the immersive theatre production YONDER, and co-composed an improvisational orchestral score for the 1922 film Nosferatu. These works draw on archival primary sources and historical and contemporary roots musics to create original performance productions as learning sites for young artists.

Smith is founding director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University, established in 2000 and now a university-recognized research center, and directs its Tech Folk Orchestra. He is managing editor of the VMC/SUNY Press series Studies in Vernacular Music. The VMC hosted the first multi-day American conferences on arts practice-based research (2015, 2017), and he continues to teach and supervise doctoral work in the field. He has served as External Examiner at the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick, and at University College Cork.

View his serialized speculative fiction, set in the mythical former Soviet satellite of Bassanda, while his peer-reviewed essays in Chigiana and in Routledge's Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom examine the Bassanda Multiverse as a site for transformative pedagogical experience. He produces the podcasts Sounding History and Voices from the Vernacular Music Center.

He is a scholar of spectacular arts from North, West, and South Africa; the Caribbean, India, the Mediterranean, medieval Europe, and the American South. He has studied, taught, and concertized in musics from all these places and times on acoustic, electric, and slide guitar; oud, lute, saz, kamelengoni, banjos, button accordions, and percussion. He is also a former nightclub bouncer, line cook, carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.

Find out more about Chris Smith here, including a full professional vita and an array of weblinks.