Hello, friends. Many of you out there (at least the ones I know about) are grad students, and I need to ask you for your help. I'm applying to phd programs right now, which is utterly terrifying and makes me want to go hide in a corner until the process is over. But I just have to work through that. So in the hopes of turning in acceptable documents, would y'all please look over my personal statement and offer some (hopefully constructive) criticism? Parts of it I just wrote, so it's still a work-in-progress. Here goes:
I want to write about the effect of the Civil Rights Movement on Southern popular music - not just soul music from Memphis and Muscle Shoals, which has always been read in terms of its relationship to the Movement, but also the effect on country music, Southern rock, and blues. How did the changing perceptions of race, political affiliations, and business opportunities affect the people who made the music and their audiences?
I first became interested in writing about Southern popular music while an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt’s location in Nashville, Tennessee, provided access and exposure to a wide variety of music. I also majored in theater, which sparked my interest in the production of art and culture, and I minored in history and sociology, which developed my understanding of culture as a product of systems related to a particular place and time. I also took several classes within the American and Southern Studies department (to my chagrin, there was no minor available at that time), which led me to join the Southern Studies department at the University of Mississippi for my Master’s degree. While at Ole Miss, I deepened my knowledge of Southern history, literature, art, and culture. I wrote my thesis on contemporary independent rock band the Drive-By Truckers, focusing on the way in which their music describes the post-Civil Rights Movement South. I was particularly interested in their depiction of place – their hometown of Muscle Shoals, Alabama – and how its history affects their view of modern race and class relations.
After finishing my MA at Ole Miss, I wanted a more global perspective on American and Southern history, and chose to pursue an MA program at King’s College London. At King’s I wrote about modern visions of 1960s era “country-soul” music, reissued in several compilation series in the late 1990s, and how those albums constitute a rewriting of Southern race relations. After finishing my work at King’s, I took a position as the Senior Library Assistant for the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi’s main library; I mostly work with the Modern Political Archives on the papers of former Senator James O. Eastland.
While at Ole Miss, I was able to take classes in a variety of subjects, including history, English, sociology, and documentary studies. My experiences at Vanderbilt and at King’s College also encouraged exploring a wide range of disciplines. As much as I enjoy interdisciplinary work, I have found that I appreciate the academic approach taken by my history classes the most, and that is what I would like to explore in my PhD level studies. For my dissertation work, I would like to draw on my interdisciplinary master’s degrees, together with a more traditional historical approach, to examine the 1960s and 1970s in the American South through a discussion of the popular music produced in the regions, and how that music reflected and sometimes shaped discussions of race that were so important to the period.
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I skimmed in between student meetings (I'll write more later) but since the graduate school decided they were no longer going to call UM "Ole Miss" (it's always "The University of Mississippi now, even in emails--and it's a bitch to type out) in any of its printed materials, you should probably do the same in your statements about your graduate degree.
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