Jelly Roll Team Profile - Peter Lawson - Musicologist

I grew up in the hills of east Tennessee. Thanks to my music-loving parents, my nursery rhymes were mostly songs by the Impressions, Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, Carole King, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Randy Newman etc., and I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t sing along with any Beatles song that happened to come on the radio. My obsession with music of all kinds continued through childhood into adolescence and gradually expanded, especially after a middle school band director heard me goofing off and told me that I actually had a pretty good baritone voice (I’ll never know whether he really meant it or was just trying to shunt me off into the choir). When I left home to study at Brown University, I ended up taking music on as my major and performing with the University Chorus.

After graduating from college I moved to Los Angeles, where I earned a PhD in musicology at UCLA while continuing to perform regularly, primarily vocal music of the renaissance and baroque periods. While pursuing my degree, I was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to assist and study under some of the greatest musicological minds of our time, including my advisor Mitchell Morris, MacArthur fellow Susan McClary, and Elijah Wald, whose Blues course, which I assisted twice and taught once, completely reshaped my way of thinking, not only about blues, but about the entire history of popular music in America.

Since I completed my studies in the Spring of 2015 I have been in Hamburg, raising my one-year-old son, teaching English, and taking any opportunity I can get to sing, relearn the guitar after a decade-long hiatus, and hear music wherever I can find it. I’m thrilled to be a part of the Jelly Roll Factory project not just because it allows me to proselytize about the early blues and jazz music that I already love but also because of the new and much needed opportunity for personal expression that it offers to me and to anyone in Hamburg who wants to take advantage of it.

(More to come from Peter on the history of this amazing music in the near future. Look out for his article on the history of the Jelly Roll in American culture. Ed)