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Paul F. Wells To Speak At Kentucky
Live Series

March 07, 2006

Bowling Green, Ky. - Paul F. Wells, founding director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, will speak at Thursday night’s “Kentucky Live” series.

The lecture will begin at 7 p.m. March 9 at the Barnes and Noble on Campbell Lane. “Kentucky Live,” sponsored by Western Kentucky University Libraries and Trace Die Cast, is free and open to the public.

Wells will be talking about collecting and preserving popular music with examples from Kentucky and will illustrate his talk with recorded music.

Wells has a wide range of academic interests and has read papers and published work on fiddling and fiddle tunes, bluegrass music, music of the Civil War, Irish traditional music, early country music, and the history of music publishing. His most recent project was curating “From Studios to States: Images of American Music Makers,” an exhibit of photographs drawn from the collections of the Center for Popular Music.

He is editing a volume of American fiddle tunes for the series “Music of the United States of America” and writing a chapter on Irish-American music for an anthology on American regional and ethnic musical traditions.

He is a past president of the Society for American Popular Music. He plays American, Canadian and Irish traditional music on fiddle, flute, guitar, mandolin and banjo.

For information, contact Brian Coutts at 745-6121.