Dale Cockrell: Blood on Fire: Sex and Music in America, 1840-1917 (May 2, 3pm)

The Department of Music and the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University Present: 

Blood on Fire:  Sex and Music in America, 1840-1917

A talk by:
Prof. Dale Cockrell (Director, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University; Professor of Musicology Emeritus, Vanderbilt University; Research Associate, University of the Free State, South Africa)

Friday, May 2, 2014
3:00PM
622 Dodge Hall (CU Morningside Campus)
Free and Open to the Public

Abstract: Prostitution in the United States between 1840-1917 was big business. Walt Whitman’s “plain truth” assertion was only a mild exaggeration when he claimed that “nineteen out of twenty of the mass of American young men, who live in or visit the great cities, are more or less familiar with houses of prostitution and are customers to them.”  Tens of thousands of brothels, concert saloons, and dance halls across the nation—all common sites for prostitution—featured regular, full-time professional music-making for dancing, and thus provided a well-paid livelihood for working musicians.  Indeed, a statistical analysis suggests that a third to half of all professional performing musicians during the period were directly employed full-time in the service of prostitution.  Evidence of that music-making indicates that an energetic “noisy” dance music was developed specifically to stimulate eroticized male bodies, and hence to stimulate profits for the houses.  This project thus explores the nexus between prostitution, music-making, dance, sexuality, blackface minstrelsy, the underground cultural economy, and the development of musical foundations upon which an extraordinarily vital twentieth-century American popular music was built.

About the speaker: Dale Cockrell is the Director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, Professor of Musicology Emeritus at Vanderbilt University, and a Research Associate of the University of the Free State (South Africa).  He is widely published in the field of American music studies, including The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook (2011), Vol. 22 in the Music of the United States of America series; Demons of Disorder:  Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (1997), which won the C. Hugh Holman Award; Excelsior:  Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842-1846 (1989), recipient of the Irving Lowens Award; ten other books and editions; and more than seventy scholarly articles.  He is a former President of the Society for American Music, from which he received the Distinguished Service Award in 2010, an elected Member of the American Antiquarian Society, and the Founder and President of  The Pa’s Fiddle Project, an educational, scholarly, and musical program dedicated to recording the music of the Little House books and reconnecting the nation’s children with the rich music legacies embedded in them.