Colloquium: Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle

You Can't Tell It Like I Can: Music, Memory and Mary Lou

Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle
University Distinguished Professor of Music, Miami University

At the time of her death in 1981, Mary Lou Williams was celebrated as one of the only jazz musicians to have played through each of the eras of jazz (1920s-late 1970s). This distinction was not simply based on Williams’ proximity to specific jazz communities that have been essentialized as part of the general understanding of genre’s progression, but also symbolized her direct contributions to that evolution of sound.

During the last decade of her life, Williams began promoting through live performances, lectures, and recordings her version of the "history of jazz." Her contextualization of this history was rooted in a form of cultural nationalism that extended out of the Black Power Movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, it also reflected how Williams, as part of a pioneering generation of black female jazz musicians, used autoethnography underscored by repertory outside of that advanced as part of the jazz canon to challenge the exclusionary and narratives of jazz’s history.

About Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle

Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle is an internationally recognized musician and scholar that teaches and researches in the area of African American music (concert and popular music) with an emphasis placed on the contributions of black women musicians. She is the author of biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, served as Associate Editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of African American Music and was also one of the Editors for the revision of the New Grove Encyclopedia of American Music. Her scholarship has appeared in a number of major peer-reviewed journals, numerous anthologies and reference works including Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music, The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music Since 1900 and Hidden Harmonies: Women and Music in Popular Entertainment and  The African American Lectionary Project, the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip Hop and Rap, the Smithsonian Anthology of Jazz, and the Carnegie Hall Digital Timeline of African American Music.

Kernodle served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City from 1999 until 2001. She has worked closely with a number of educational programs including the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, Jazz@Lincoln Center and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Kernodle is also a regular contributor to programming distributed by National Public Radio, Canadian Public Radio, and the BBC and appears in a number of award-winning documentaries including Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band and Girls in the Band, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, and How It Feels to Be Free.

Professor Kernodle is the Past President of the Society for American Music and currently serves as scholar-in-residence and Curator of the I Dream a World Festival, a collaborative program with New World Symphony (Miami, Florida), which seeks to elevate the music and voices of black artisans. She currently teaches at Miami University in Oxford, OH where she holds the rank of University Distinguished Professor.