Marcia Herndon

Marcia Alice Herndon (October 1, 1941May 19, 1997) was an American ethnomusicologist and anthropologist.

She specialized in the ways culture and music reflect each other.

Herndon grew up in a family of country music performers in North Carolina.

Marcia Alice Herndon was born October 1, 1941, in Canton, North Carolina, close to where her grandparents lived.

She spent her early years in the Tennessee and North Carolina hills and performed country music with her family.

When she began her formal music training, she turned away from country music, focusing on classical music and performance.

She played several different instruments including the organ.

In 1962, Herndon graduated from H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in New Orleans, now known as Tulane University, with a bachelor's degree in German.

After completing her master's degree in 1964 at Tulane University, she performed classical music for several years.

Although she also studied music, covering piano, voice, and organ, Herndon completed her master's degree in German at Tulane University in 1964.

Besides German, she spoke English, French, Malagasy, and Spanish.

Earning a PhD in anthropology and ethnomusicology in 1971, she taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland.

She is widely known for her contributions to Native American music studies with books such as Native American Music, as well as collaborating on Music as Culture, and Music, Gender, and Culture, which analyze the overlapping of musical forms and cultural structures.

Herndon's works have been used as university textbooks.

Her contributions to the field of ethnomusicology were recognized by the Society of Ethnomusicology, which created an award in her name.

The Marcia Herndon Prize is allotted to those who focus on the studies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and two-spirit communities.

After several years of classical music performance, she returned to school and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and ethnomusicology in 1971 from Tulane.

Her doctoral thesis, under the direction of Norma McLeod, focused on the impact of Maltese music upon the religion and politics of the country.

It would become the basis for her article Analysis: The Herding of Sacred Cows?.

Herndon started her career as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1971.

She taught ethnomusicology and anthropology at the university for seven years.

Before she arrived, the university did not include ethnomusicology in their folklore studies.

While teaching in Texas, Herndon developed a course which returned to her roots in country music and examined the genre from an anthropological perspective.

Students of the course looked at how country music was viewed culturally as music of white, unsophisticated and lower-class people, even for those who gained fame.

It also examined how the genre was used as a gateway for singers like Charley Pride and Johnny Rodriguez to gain acceptance in white society.

In 1975, Herndon and McLeod hosted the symposium "Form in Performance: Hard Core Ethnography" in Austin.

The conference brought together for the first time scholars of various disciplines to discuss performance as a reflection of culture and societal values.

The subsequent publication of the conference proceedings was edited by Herndon.

In 1978, Herndon was hired as the director of Native American Studies the University of California, Berkeley.

She became active in the civil rights movements sweeping the country at that time, including the Women's liberation movement in North America.

Wanting to create a venue which would support independent scholarship without censorship in ethnomusicological research, in 1984, she founded the Music Research Institute, in Hercules, California.

She encouraged research into issues such as the demise of American community orchestras, censorship of lyrics, and the effects to hearing caused by amplified sound.

Her activism and support of alternative research led to a fissure with the university and she left in 1985.

Herndon continued working at the Music Research Institute, expanding it from its location in the San Francisco Bay Area by creating branches in Richmond, California and Hyattsville, Maryland.

In 1987, she became the co-chair of the International Council for Traditional Music’s Music and Gender Study Group, introducing interdisciplinary studies on the cultural construction of gender and its impacts on music and performance.

In 1989, Herndon, who had a history of lupus, had a stroke, which resulted in deafness in one ear and left her with sensitivity in her feet.

Despite these health issues, in 1990 she became a professor in the division of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the School of Music at the University of Maryland.

At the same time, she served as an affiliate of the Women's Studies Department.

Herndon remained active, in spite of a subsequent cancer diagnosis, hosting the international conference, "Gender and the Musics of Death" for the Music and Gender Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music.

The event was hosted at the University of Maryland in November 1996.