One of the nation’s leading musicologists, Tammy L. Kernodle’s research focuses on African American music, gender studies in music, and race in American popular culture. A University Distinguished Professor of Music at Miami University of Ohio, she’ll bring her expertise to the week’s theme — “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music” — by highlighting the ways innumerable that Black women have transformed American music.
For the Week Six installment of the African American Heritage House’s Chautauqua Speaker Series, Kernodle will speak at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
Kernodle’s own field has grown exponentially in the past 50 years, as “the historiography of Black music-making in America” grew and “Black music studies gained firmer footing as a disciplinary field,” Kernodle wrote in the introduction to Music in Black American Life, 1945-2020, an anthology published by the University of Illinois Press. The collection, she wrote “explores Black expressive culture in key moments of liminality where it challenged genre categorization and the exclusionary definitions of what constituted American music.”
The very nature of jazz, blues, gospel, R&B and hip-hop was created by shifts in Black culture, identity, labor, and a changing cultural and entertainment industry — “and white America’s growing appetite for Black culture.”
Kernodle’s extensive body of scholarly writing has appeared in numerous journals, reference books and anthologies, and her popular writing and expertise has been featured in outlets like the BBC and NPR. This past December she spoke with Juana Summers about the comparisons — and manufactured rivalry — between Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, who both had record-breaking years. Kernodle put it this way: When looking at the top tours of 2023, no one would ever say that Bruce Springsteen was in competition with Ed Sheeran.
“Why is it that women are always pitted against each other? I think it has a lot to do with how we define artistry, how we defiance acceptable space in certain social spheres, but also in reference to music, if women can be within the narrative,” Kernodle told Summers.
Oftentimes, particularly in the history of popular American music, “there’s only been space for one woman, and she has to be an exceptional woman,” Kernodle said. “The way in which that exceptionalism is measured or marked continually changes — according to genre, sometimes race, sometimes generation.”
In addition to speaking with NPR about the danger of competitive tropes hindering the development of women artists, Kernodle has written for and consulted with The American Jazz Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Smithsonian Folkways and Carnegie Hall.
The past president of the Society for American Music, and the current curator of the I Dream a World Festival — a multi-year initiative with New World Symphony that celebrates the legacy of Black composers — she’s appeared in several award-winning documentaries, as well, including “Girls in the Band,” and “Miles Davis: The Birth of Cool.” Kernodle also appeared in the documentary “Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band,” about the jazz pianist, arranger, and composer behind hundreds of compositions and arrangements, and more than 100 records.
Williams, one of the most celebrated women in jazz history, is also the subject of Kernodle’s book, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. In it, Kernodle distills years of research into who the “real” Williams was — no easy feat, she wrote. More than 20 years after the musician’s death, historians were still trying to define her legacy. Her life, Kernodle wrote, “is an epic tale of the experiences of a woman who had no concept of limitations.”
