Who We Are
Scholars
KATHLEEN HUDSON, Executive Director, the Texas Heritage Music Foundation, is the author of Women in Texas Music: Stories and Songs, published in 2007 by the University of Texas Press. Kathleen teaches technical communication, freshman composition, creative writing, mythology, world literature, and advanced composition in the English Department at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas. She founded the Texas Heritage Music Foundation in 1987 out of a commitment that stories and songs make a difference in the world. Her background includes a dissertation full of quotations by writers on writing, a weekly newspaper column, a radio series on Texas music, and a monthly column NOW in On The Road with Kathleen. She is the author of Telling Stories, Writing Songs: An Album of Texas Songwriters, a book on Texas songwriters based on her oral history project in Texas music. Kathleen is also a certified trainer with an educational program called “The Past is Prologue” and uses the Native American learning story in the classroom and with groups. Each year PIP has an annual conference at Schreiner University.
MICHAEL T. BERTRAND is an assistant professor of history at Tennessee State University. A native of South Louisiana, he also has taught at the University of Memphis, Middle Tennessee State University, and the University of Mississippi. His research interests focus on southern history, culture, and music, with an emphasis on comprehending the relationship between popular culture and social change. The University of Illinois Press recently released a second (paperback) edition of his first book, Race, Rock, and Elvis. He has written published articles on Hank Williams, rockabilly, country music and gender, barn dance radio and the blackface tradition, and popular music and southern race relations. He is currently working on a manuscript on African American radio programming in the South between 1948 and 1963.
MARY BUFWACK holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently the CEO of United Neighborhood Health Services, Inc. a non-profit group of seven community health centers in Nashville and middle Tennessee. Her work in non-profit community-based organizations was preceded by 7 years on the faculty of Colgate University in upstate New York where she taught sociology and anthropology. A fan and historian of country music, her book Finding Her Voice: The History of Women in Country Music, written jointly with her husband Robert K. Oermann, a music journalist, was published by Crown Publishers in 1993 and remains the most definitive history in its area. It received a Deems Taylor award for excellence in the field of music scholarship. An updated version was published again in 2004 by Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Hall of Fame Press.
TRACEY E. W. LAIRD earned her PhD from the University of Michigan and currently serves as assistant professor of music at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She is the author of Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music along the Red River (NY: Oxford University Press, 2005) and a native of the Hayride's hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.
DAVID SANJEK, Ph.D., is the Director of the BMI Archives. He received his Ph.D. in American Literature from Washington University and has taught at New York University, Fordham University, Hunter College and the New School. Dr. Sanjek has published widely on popular music, film, cultural studies and critical legal studies among other subjects and participates at numerous conferences, including meetings of the American Studies Association, International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the annual conference on writing about music held at the Experience Music Project. He has been an advisor to the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, Blues Foundation, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Experience Music Project and other bodies, films, radio series and television programs. He is completing Always On My Mind: Music, Memory and Money and at work on other projects.
KIM SIMPSON completed his Ph.D. in American Studies in August 2005 at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, Hit Radio and the Formatting of America in the Early 1970s, is an interdisciplinary analysis of the development of commercial music radio formats, fusing media and communication studies with popular music history and American cultural history. An experienced university instructor, Simpson has also worked in music publishing and has toured as a professional musician. He is currently Vice President of the Artist and Repertoire Department at RippyFish Records.
