Grammy-winning professor captured vanishing blues and got singers work
David Evans strums his guitar outside his Millington home Aug. 16. (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian)
All the while David Evans was earning his doctorate in folklore and mythology at the University of California, Los Angeles, he was stealing away to Mississippi and Louisiana with a recorder in the backseat, capturing the bewitching blues he couldn’t stop hearing.
That was in the mid- to late-1960s.
In 1978, then an ethnomusicologist, Memphis State hired Evans to start and direct its graduate program in musicology.
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Jane Roberts
Longtime journalist Jane Roberts is a Minnesotan by birth and a Memphian by choice. She's lived and reported in the city more than two decades. She covers business news and features for The Daily Memphian.
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