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Biography
Dr. Linda F. Williams is an internationally recognized musician, scholar, and author. She has performed with some of the top names in jazz, including Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Archie Shepp, Nat Adderley and Shirley Scott. She received two Fulbright Scholarships, served on the board of evaluators for the National Endowment for the Humanities, served as an adjudicator and clinician judge for the Lionel Hampton Annual Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho; and published compact discs, and major journal articles in American Music, American Ethnologist, Journal of Black Music Research (Center of Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago), International Jazz Archives, Readings in African Diaspora Music and, and the National Endowment for the Arts Foundation. Her anthology Black Women and Music: More than the Blues, co-authored by E. Hayes is recently published by the University of Illinois Press (2008).
Williams received degrees in music from Virginia State University, the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1996. With secondary minors in African Studies and the African Diaspora, African American Studies, and Jazz, Williams embarked upon research that contributed to an acute understanding of diverse music cultures both in the United States and abroad. While performing consistently with musicians of diverse backgrounds in Zimbabwe, Ghana, Cape Town, several Caribbean Islands, establishing trust, and interviewing cultural bearers, she held a unique position living with, and studying cultures abroad. Williams’ scholarship focuses upon the transatlantic influences of African American culture and its impact upon music and politics in Southern Africa. Such research addresses issues of the reciprocal interplay of music and cultures globally, gender and music, and the negotiation of cultural identities within music of world cultures.
At Virginia State, Williams pledged Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, associated with high achievement and public service. At Michigan, she encouraged curricular change through her unconventional decision to study African American music. Before entering the Ph.D. program, she was granted tenure as a professor of humanities at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the first historically black institution of higher education in the United States. After receiving the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, she began teaching at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1996, and earned tenure in 2002. She has also taught at Mt. Holyoke College, University of Pittsburgh, and Zimbabwe College of Music.
Dr. Williams has not only been one of the few African American women in the field of jazz, her work has also expanded into research and publication on music and culture in Zimbabwe and South Africa. She became an international scholar able to measure the global significance of African women in music, and to trace the intersections and borrowings between African and African American music. Her openness to brilliance in others has fueled her own creativity, particularly in scholarship on Zimbabwe where she developed an original approach to the methodology in her field. Her work was recognized for its innovative significance while she was still in graduate school, and it has earned her deep respect both in academic circles and in the countries she studies. In 1998, she achieved the culmination of this work into her innovative teaching at Bates College, where Williams offered courses on West African drumming, World Music, and Ethnomusicology, among others, and organized the extremely popular Bates College Steel Drum Ensemble.
During the mid-1990s, Williams revived the jazz scene in Zimbabwe, which now reputedly includes many more African women because of Williams’ influence, and brought public attention to the scarcity of jazz musicians in that country. Many women previously afraid to enter the jazz clubs in Zimbabwe are now regular musicians there. Modeling Williams’ character and example, such female jazz musicians have learned a sense of self-respect, self-worth, and pride.
Williams joined the faculty at Creighton University in 2008 as Resident Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology. Teaching has become an extension of Williams’ scholarship in that the content of her courses is related not only to current methods, but also very prominently to her research. Here at Creighton, Williams teaches courses in Jazz and American Culture, American Popular Music, Music of World’s Culture, Music Appreciation, and Women and Gender in Music. In 2009, along with Dr. Portia K. Maultsby, eminent scholar and distinguished Indiana University Professor of Ethnomusicology, Williams contributed historical narratives to the Carnegie Hall On-Line Jazz Educational Program.