Revell Carr
My research is based in the interactions between different cultural groups and individuals. I study transgressive border areas where identities are negotiated and where new forms and new traditions are invented. In this way, my work reflects one of the primary characteristics of American popular music, that it is constantly dynamic, fluidly moving from form to form, incorporating elements of whatever musical styles enter its scope. I am currently completing work on my dissertation which is a study of the multiethnic music aboard 19th century sailing ships. This project will present a new perspective on musical interactions between blacks and whites in the antebellum period, but will also illuminate the earliest musical encounters between Americans and Polynesians, a little known area of music history. This dissertation will be a treatise on the intercultural musical frontiers of the 19th century and how they led directly to the development of popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I have been a scholar of American sea chanteys and sailor ballads for twenty years, beginning in the 1980s when I worked as an educator at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. In 1990 I moved to California to work for the National Park Service at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, where I led a monthly “Sea Chantey Sing-Along” in the hold of a schooner that was regularly attended by over a hundred people. The sing along was profiled on an edition of “Weekend All Things Considered” on National Public Radio - KQED (1995), and I also appeared at schools and festivals throughout the Bay Area, even performing sea chanteys on several local news programs.
I also study contemporary popular music cultures, primarily I have published on the music and the belief systems of Deadheads, fans of the Californian rock band the Grateful Dead. This reflects my interest in marginal subcultures, audience reception, the nature of “improvisation” in the context of rock music, and even the ineffable, “supernatural” capacities of popular music. For the last six years I have been involved with an interdisciplinary group of scholars who study and analyze the music and culture of the Grateful Dead, and who meet yearly at the annual conference of the Southwest/Texas branch of the Popular Culture Association.
I was a Teaching Assistant at UCSB in the Black Studies department for Introduction to Black Studies and Blacks in the Media. I have been the Teaching Associate for the Music Department’s Introduction to Word Music class, and I was also the Teaching Associate for the Popular Music and Culture class at UCSB for two years. The lectures I gave for the popular music class reflect my interests beyond sea music and the Grateful Dead: Blackface on Stage and Film, Steel Guitar and Ukulele as Icons of Hawai’ianness, Paul Simon’s Graceland and the Politics of Appropriation, Music and Social Protest from the 19th century to the 21st, Easy Listening and Exotica as Responses to Rock and Roll, Technology and Copyright in the Music Industry, and many more.
I am also a former member of the UCSB Gamelan Ensemble, and the infamous Lemon Pickers. I've played in rock bands since I was 16, when I formed a punk band called Pungent Vegetables. . .
Contact Information:
revellc@earthlink.net