Biography
Matthew D. Sutton is a postdoctoral assistant in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. His book-in-progress, Storyville, examines autobiographies by U.S. southern musicians who came of age during Jim Crow, using New Orleans as a geographic and conceptual locus.
Research
Storyville, the first full-scale study of its kind, utilizes the methods of literary and cultural criticism to analyze the remarkably attuned historical consciousness that underscores southern musicians’ autobiographies. Combining first-person reportage with sophisticated narrative techniques, these autobiographies delineate how vernacular music reflected and subverted racial customs in the segregated United States, challenging both essentialism and Southern exceptionalism. Read collectively, these accounts constitute a virtual archive, where unique local practices and long-vanished sites are documented and preserved in writing and projected to the wider culture.
