Chloe Smith

Chloe Smith is a third-year PhD student in Music History. Her research centers on American folk song and popular music since the mid-19th century. Her dissertation will (probably) focus on issues of Civil War memory, considering the ability of folk and popular song to express and perpetuate both nostalgia for an Old South and a sonic dimension of white supremacy — from sentimental ballads and anti-Reconstruction anthems of the late 19th century to folk music’s role in disseminating neo-Confederate ideologies online and at protests today. She has interests in vaudeville and late 19th-century mass culture, early blues recordings, the folk song collecting initiatives of the Lomaxes and the New Deal government in the 1930s, and the Afrofuturist free jazz of Sun Ra. Chloe also engages with scholarship on Black feminist theory and temporality in her research on musical responses to the 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

She earned her M.A. in Music History at Yale University in 2020. Her master’s thesis, “Shadows in the Magic City: Musical Responses to Racial Violence in Birmingham, Alabama,” connects the perspectives of Sun Ra and his high school band director John “Fess” Whatley to broader Black intellectual traditions responding to segregation and violence in the Jim Crow South.

She earned her B.A. in History and Music from Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama in 2019, where she studied violin and became interested in local history. She is from Anniston, Alabama, and she worked as a music teacher and violinist for several years.