Eileen Southern (1920-2002) dedicated her life to documenting the traditions of Black music in America. Through her work, she illuminated her community’s true musical diversity.
Eileen Southern (1920-2002) dedicated her life to documenting the traditions of Black music in America. Through her work, she illuminated her community’s true musical diversity.
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Today’s Womanican dedicated her life to documenting the traditions of Black music in America. Through her work, she illuminated her community’s true musical diversity.
Please welcome Eileen Southern.
Eileen Stanza Jackson was born on February 19th, 1920, in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Lilla Gibson Jackson and Walter Wade Jackson. She was the eldest of three sisters. Her father, Walter, was a chemist.
Eileen said that her parents had a “tremendous love” for music; they were both musicians and sang in church choirs.They even bought a baby grand piano for the house. It was a huge financial sacrifice, but it was the instrument Eileen learned to play on. She gave her first concert at the age of eight.
After their parents separated, Eileen and her sisters began splitting time between Minneapolis and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Eileen recalled the days spent with her father in Sioux Falls as a time filled with morning practice and evening music.
Eventually, Eileen settled in Chicago, with her mother. There, she took and taught piano lessons at the Abraham Lincoln Center Settlement. At 16, she entered the University of Chicago. She earned two humanities degrees, including her master’s degree in music, by 21.
Eileen’s curiosity and thirst for knowledge pushed her into teaching. For the first few years of her career, Eileen mainly taught at historically Black colleges and universities in the South. Her opportunities to play were limited by the deep racism of the Jim Crow era. It also affected her daily life: where she could eat, where she could use a public restroom, and where she could live. Throughout the 1940s, Eileen balanced teaching with a concert career and motherhood. She played at Carnegie Hall in New York City and at Lincoln Center in Chicago.
In 1951 Eileen applied to the PhD program in music at Harvard University. She traveled all the way to Cambridge, only to be told that another Black woman had already been accepted into that year’s program. “Apparently they had decided that one [Black] person was the limit,” Eileen said in a later interview.
So instead, Eileen moved to New York City with her family to study and teach. A decade later, in 1961, Eileen earned her PhD from New York University. Eileen was the first Black scholar to earn a PhD in musicology in the U.S. She taught at various colleges in New York before finally returning to Cambridge. In 1976, she became the first Black woman tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.
Things were not easy for Eileeen at Harvard. There was a lack of institutional support for Black faculty, erasure of her contributions, and daily bias. She said how challenging it was in many interviews. Yet she also acknowledged what an opportunity it was, and how she enjoyed working with her students.
Somehow during this decade of immense achievement in her career, she also managed to publish a landmark book: “The Music of Black Americans: A History.”
At the time, perceptions of the musical contributions of Black artists were often limited to jazz. Eileen illuminated the diverse musical traditions of her community. Many of her contemporaries agreed that her book filled a void in the white-washed history of American music.
In 1976, Eileen and her husband, Joseph Southern, founded the Black Perspective in Music. It was a journal meant to promote and give a platform to scholars of Black music.
Eileen continued to transform her field and open pathways for future generations of Black scholars in music. She received a National Humanities Medal in 2001 for having ''helped transform the study and understanding of American music.'' She also received the 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of American Music. Eileen died on October 13, 2002, in Port Charlotte, Florida, at the age of 82.