James Revell Carr

Director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music

James Revell Carr, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American music, studies the development of hybrid music and dance cultures in the context of travel and commerce. His major interests include sea chanteys, Anglo-American balladry, Hawaiian music, folk music revivals, and improvisational rock.

Carr's first book, Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels (University of Illinois Press, 2014), about the musical exchange between American sailors and Hawaiian musicians in the nineteenth century, was a co-recipient of the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Alan P. Merriam Prize for outstanding book in ethnomusicology for 2015. Carr has articles and reviews in the Journal of American Folklore, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, The Journal of British Studies, American Historical Review and others. He has also published essays in numerous books about The Grateful Dead and their fans, the Deadheads.

Before coming to University of Kentucky, Dr. Carr was Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he founded the UNCG Old Time Ensemble. Before that he curated major exhibits at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Oregon and was the Interpretive Specialist Park Ranger at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, and an educator at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. He was the original music supervisor for the English Broadside Ballad Archive, an online database of seventeenth century print ballads funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Carr formerly served as the president of the Southeastern and Caribbean Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology and chair of the Historical Ethnomusicology Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He presents his work at the conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the Southwest Popular Culture Association, and the International Council for Traditional Music, and other national and international symposia.