Professor in American Studies Brian Ward to Deliver Public Lecture

"Delius, Davidson and the Drive-by Truckers: 

What is Southern about the Music of the US South?"

18 January, 2016
Presentation Hall, Design Building, City Campus East at Northumbria University. Refreshments will be available from 6pm. The lecture will begin at 6.30pm

Synopsis

This lecture discusses the unlikely coincidence that British-born classical composer Fredrick Delius, Tennessee poet-critic Donald Davidson, and Alabama alternative country rockers the Drive-By Truckers each wrote an “opera” about the southern United States. The lecture will consider how these very different artists, working in different musical styles, at different historical moments, each tried to evoke aspects of the US South in musical form and how “musical southern-ness” has been created and consumed both nationally and internationally.

About the Speaker

Brian Ward is Professor in American Studies at Northumbria University.

He is the author of numerous book chapters and scholarly articles and has published nine books, including Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations, which won Organization of American Historian’s James A. Rawley prize for the best book on the history of United States race relations and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Outstanding Literary Achievement. In 2013, the book was also selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best history books written on the United States civil rights movement.

He is also author of Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (2004), which won the Best History Book Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. His most recent books are three co-edited volumes on Creating and Consuming the American South (2015), The American South and the Atlantic World (2013), and Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South (2013).