2025 Charles Seeger Lecture: Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje

The Fiddle/Violin in African American Culture: Meanings and Associations.

Introduction by Birgitta J. Johnson, University of South Carolina

The Charles Seeger Lecturer for the SEM 2025 Annual Meeting, held in Atlanta, Georgia, is UCLA Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje. She will discuss “The Fiddle/Violin in African American Culture: Meanings and Associations.” Her retirement from UCLA in 2013 as a Distinguished Professor marked 34 years of service and leadership to the university in the Departments of Ethnomusicology, Music, and the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA in 1979, DjeDje taught at the historic Tuskegee University (1975-179). Her collegiate education in music began as a piano major at another HBCU and the birthplace of American concert spirituals, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her time at UCLA actually began when she was a graduate student where she earned her master’s and doctoral degrees. It was at UCLA in the 1970s and working with “the father of African musicology” J.H. Kwabena Nketia that “Jackie" began a lifelong pursuit of researching African and African American musical traditions, documenting their connections as well as their distinctions. She is particularly interested in how the dynamics of urban life give rise to change and other musical activity. In addition to conducting fieldwork in several countries in West Africa (Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal), East Africa (Ethiopia), North Africa (Egypt and Morocco), as well as Jamaica, she has also done ethnographic research in various parts of the United States such as California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia. In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, anthropologist and Black feminist literary pioneer Zora Neale Hurston defined research as “…formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Professor DjeDje’s contributions to the fields of ethnomusicology, Africana studies, history, and archiving exemplify the kinds of excellence a life of focused poking and prying can yield to the world. In the encomium for her 2020 SEM Honorary Member recognition I noted, “she is a scholar of excellence, distinction, tenacity, candor, and respect who gently pushes her students, colleagues, and community to dig deeper, ask more questions, and add to the overall cultural historical narrative from as many angles as possible. She has been a remarkable presence in the discipline of Ethnomusicology serving in numerous roles that modern ethnomusicologists strive to embody today.”