Well friends, my second semester of teaching at the
Global Village is just about in the books and I can honestly say that I
absolutely loved it. There was certainly a learning curve involved with the course
this second time around (particularly regarding how to adjust a 16-week course
to fit into an eight-weeks only schedule), but somehow it all worked out. Once
again the semester was filled with incredible guest speakers and interesting
student papers and I still can’t believe that I got paid to teach about country
music around the world. It's been a sweet gig!
I’d like to take just a moment to sincerely thank
both Indiana University and the Global Village Living-Learning Center for
providing me with this opportunity. Specifically, I’d like to once again thank
Dr. Jeff Holdeman, director of the Global Village, for his tireless work
promoting the course to new students and student-advisors, his always creative
pedagogy tips, the inspiration to always improve myself as an instructor, and
for sharing his wisdom and experience to continually improve the course. Sincere thanks are also due to new GV coordinator Andy Fak who assisted
me throughout the semester with many mini course-related crises.
Even though I felt as though last semester’s course
went well, I was excited to incorporate several of the student’s
suggestions into improving the course for this second time around. Fewer papers
were assigned, more listening exercises were done in class, a lot of new
information on international country music was researched and presented, and a
whole new group of distinguished guest speakers lined up to meet and/or speak
with our class.
Much like last semester, our lineup of guest
speakers was truly spectacular. We kicked off our series by Skyping with the
always affable and legendary rockabilly singer on Starday, Sun, and Capitol
Records (and one of Elvis Presley’s first touring mates), Rudy “Tutti”
Grayzell. We were then joined in class by Australian country music songwriter
and performer Al Backstrom, who not only presented a stellar lecture on the
history of country music in Australia, but also performed his own version of Australiana
music for the class! (The Wild Colonial Boy!!!) We then phoned in Maine’s main country music attraction,
bluegrass legend and Event Records founder, Al Hawkes. All three of these
speakers were fantastic and raised some very interesting points about country
music in all parts of the world (including Mexico, Australia, and Libya in
particular) and provided some great material for later class discussions. In
addition to our speakers, it was also a thrill to once again screen Beth
Harrington’s 2003 Grammy-nominated documentary, Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly, as well as Lee
Bidgood’s excellent documentary, Banjo
Romantika, about bluegrass music in the Czech Republic. Words don’t seem to
do justice in expressing my gratitude to these fine folks, but Rudy, Al, Al,
Beth, and Lee, thank you all so much for your contributions!
Last but not least I’d like to thank the fifteen
brave student souls who enrolled in my class and stuck around until the end. It’s
been tough to keep up with all the work at times (not only do the students have
half the time to do all their work, but I also have half the time to grade all
their papers), but I greatly appreciate all of the energy and thought they put
into our discussions and readings and I am mighty proud of their work,
especially on their final research papers. I always love reading the final
papers for this class because each student is assigned a different country to research
and I love finding out which aspects of country music they discovered and explored.
This semester’s locales included Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, England,
France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, and Sweden.
As I mentioned last semester, these kinds of courses don’t happen without the help
and encouragement from a lot of different people and I’ve been extremely
fortunate throughout my academic career to have people in my corner rooting for
me along the way. I’m excited now to be continuing my development as an
instructor with my own classes, where I can now be in a position to help
students by being that person in their corner. And in that spirit, if any of my
students ever need any recommendations or just help with future classes, or if
you just want to go have lunch at Gresham, please do drop me a line and say,
‘Howdy!’
