You Study Long,…
Monday, March 7 I woke up in a hotel bed in Bloomington, Indiana. I had one purpose for my stop-through there: to begin filling the holes in the information I had gathered on recordings of Negro Spirituals. At this point, I’ve identified more than 4,000 entries that met my criteria for the project, but quite a few are missing data that I believe are critical to making the results useful to the singers and voice teachers I hope to inform. Although a very early start would have given me more time to study, I decided not to push it since I was still tired from the MLA conference I’d just attended. Still, I was pulling into the parking lot a block away from the School of Music at the Indiana University at around 11:15. (Two things here: one, the students seem unconcerned about the potential of being run over by…