J. Tyler Fritts is an adjunct member of the music department faculty at Rhodes, where he teaches courses in ethnomusicology. His primary research interests concern folk and popular music of the American South.
Dr. Fritts has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Memphis and the greater Mississippi Delta (blues, punk, rap), and in eastern Kentucky (ballads and fiddle tunes). He has presented his work at local, regional, national, and international conferences, including the Society for Ethnomusicology, the EMP Pop Conference, the Social and Cultural Study of Music Conference, and the International Conference on the Blues. In addition to publishing album reviews in The World of Music (New Series) and Black Grooves, Dr. Fritts’s article on lyric formulas in the folk blues is set to appear in the January 2020 edition of Ethnomusicology.
Education
M.M., Music History and Literature, the University of Louisville
Ph.D., Musicology/Southern Regional Studies, the University of Memphis
