Charles E. Hamm

Hamm, 1947 Corks and Curls

Charles E. Hamm (April 21, 1925 - October 16, 2011) was a member of the Virginia Glee Club during the Glee Club 1943-1944 and 1946-1947 seasons. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1947. He lived in 39 West Range in 1943–1944 and 37 West Lawn in 1944–1945.

Hamm was an American musicologist, writer on music, composer, and music educator. He is credited with being the first music historian to seriously study and write about American popular music.

Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times that "Mr. Hamm was one of the first scholars to study the history of American popular music with musicological rigor and sensitivity to complex racial and ethnic dynamics, and both oral and written traditions. He traced pop’s history not just to its full recent flowering in the 1950s or to the 19th century and Stephen Foster, but also to the colonial-era compositions that created the context for all that followed."

His obituary in the University of Virginia Magazine reads:

Charles E. Hamm (Col ’47) of Lebanon, N.H., died Oct. 16, 2011. He served in the Marine Corps during World War II. At the University, he was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity, the Glee Club and the marching band. Later, he held professorships at Tulane University, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Dartmouth College, where he was named the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music in 1976 and chair of the department of music. He also held visiting professorships at the University of Texas at Austin, Hamilton College, Brooklyn College and New York University, among others. In 1976, he made a lecture tour of music schools in India under a Fulbright grant, and in 1988, he made a similar lecture tour of the Peoples’ Republic of China. One of the first musicologists to study popular music, he was a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, twice serving as chairperson of that organization. Two of his books, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (1979) and Music in the New World (1983), both published by Norton, became standards in their field, and the latter was awarded the first Irving Lowens Book Award by the Society for American Music. He served as president of the American Musicological Society and was elected an honorary member of that society in 1993. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers gave him special recognition in 1998 for his work on Irving Berlin, and the Society for American Music presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. Other awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright research grant and several grants from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Works

• Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (1979)
• Music in the New World (1983)
• Putting Popular Music in its Place (1995)
• Irving Berlin: Songs From the Melting Pot (1997)