[Congratulations to Charles Hamm!]
SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN MUSIC HONORS
LORETTA LYNN AS HONORARY MEMBER -- AND --
CHARLES HAMM WITH LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Honorary Member: LORETTA LYNN
Loretta Lynn was born in a tiny log cabin in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, the
second of eight children. Married early to Mooney Lynn, she moved with her
growing family to Washington State, where job prospects were better than in
the coal-mining region of Kentucky. There, she soon began singing with
local country bands. In 1960 Loretta Lynn signed her first recording
contract, with a small label out of Vancouver, British Columbia. She and
Mooney personally mailed her first recording --"I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" --
to country music stations across the nation and then drove cross-country,
promoting it at every station that would give them airtime. That work paid
off, for it rose to #14 on the country music charts and led to her first
appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. By the middle of the 1960s, Loretta Lynn
was writing and performing songs that spoke to adults with a special set of
life-problems, generally ones of the heart. Many of her best and
best-known songs, such as "You Ain't Woman Enough [To Steal my Man]" and
"Don't Come Home A Drinkin' [With Lovin' on your Mind]" articulate a
woman's perspective, which was rare then in a music that had mainly been by
and about men.
Appropriately, in 1972, Loretta Lynn became the first woman to win
"Entertainer of the Year" award from the Country Music Association. Her
star rose even higher in 1976 with the publication of her best-selling
autobiography, Coal Miner's Daughter, a title she borrowed from another of
her hits. Her book and her life soon after became the source and subject
for a successful and highly acclaimed movie, one that appealed not only to
lovers of country music but also to general audiences across the nation and
around the world. She continues to write, perform, and record her
legions of fans would not have it otherwise. And she has been honored by
her peers and colleagues: she is a long-standing member of the Grand Ole
Opry (where she still makes regular appearances) and she was elected in
1988 to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
We are all graced by her talent, work, accomplishments, and humanity.
The Society for American Music is deeply honored to welcome Loretta Lynn
into membership in our society of lovers of America's music.
Lifetime Achievement Award: CHARLES HAMM
With its award for Lifetime Achievement, the Society for American Music
recognizes and celebrates the singular contributions of Charles Edward
Hamm, historian, teacher, and composer of American music. It is our good
fortune that this charismatic Virginian spurned professional baseball to
take up a career in music. After earning his BA degree at his home-town
University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he studied with Randall Thompson
and a cadre of German immigrant musicologists at Princeton University where
he gained the Ph.D. The systematic musicological approach he acquired
there in his work on Renaissance music launched his career, which led him
first to a teaching position at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
He was always aware of the music around him, and it was in Ohio that one
of his first writings on American music appeared, chronicling the careers
and hymnody of the Chapin brothers, who held some of the earliest singing
schools in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and in Ohio. Here too he
wrote his first operas, most to his own librettos based on American
literature. And he was among the first to introduce the music of Charles
Ives to college students, in the days before recordings and editions of
Ives' music were widely available.
In 1959 Charles Hamm moved to Tulane, where he continued composing operas
and chamber music for voices and instruments. During his New Orleans
sojourn, Gilbert Chase joined the faculty and established his
Inter-American Music Institute, one of the first academic centers for the
study of music from this hemisphere.
In 1963, Hamm left Tulane for the University of Illinois where he excelled
at teaching through lectures, seminars, and mentoring. His classes on
American music history, sheet music and popular music spurred his research
and led him to write landmark books. In his courses as in his writing, he
presented even complex ideas in clear, well-organized fashion. He was an
engaging and much sought-after teacher.
Before leaving Illinois for Dartmouth in 1976 so he could focus on
teaching and writing, he proposed creating a national union catalog of
American musical archives, an idea that led to the Resources of American
Music History directory. In the mid-1970s he helped plan the Rockefeller
Foundation project to create a one-hundred record set of historical
American music for the Bicentennial (now New World Records), and in 1983
W.W. Norton published his book Music in the New World, which cited and
discussed many of the examples in the New World Records set. It was the
first history of music in the United States for which readers could
actually hear most of the works discussed. Among its many contributions,
this book established his idea that the mixture of cultural backgrounds in
the United States gave rise to distinctly American music, different in
character from what had been brought to this continent from elsewhere. And
it championed the study of what Hamm called "invisible music," the
performance of music in oral tradition unaccompanied by the written records
normally favored by historians.
Equally influential was his book Yesterdays: Popular Song in America
(Norton, 1979), the first musicological study of the full sweep of American
popular song. He wrote the first article on American popular music for The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Only after these publications
did popular music become an acceptable topic for college courses, refereed
publications, and scholarly meetings.
During sabbaticals and following retirement in 1989, he traveled to South
Africa and China where he was a keen observer of American music in other
cultures. Most recently, he has written about and edited the early songs
of Irving Berlin, creating one of the first scholarly editions of American
popular songs.
But for all their significance, these accomplishments are only the
beginning of Charles Hamm's story. His greatest achievements may lie in
championing American music as a field of study and teaching. No fewer than
three of this Society's eight past presidents were among his students.
Those who had the privilege of studying with him never felt they were doing
work for him, but always felt they were working with him in discovering new
things about themselves and music. Through his example, he has advocated a
full life of music making, listening, and understanding. All of us are
influenced by him, and we are still enjoying the discovery.
________
Distributed by:
Homer Rudolf, Chair
Public Relations
Society for American Music
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173
phone: 804/262-4174
fax: 804/287-6814
web page: www.richmond.edu/~hrudolf/
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