Samuel Parler, PhD

Samuel Parler joined the Baylor faculty in 2019. His research focuses on genre, identity, and media in U.S. popular music, particularly country music. His current book project, Hillbillies and Mountain Williams: Racial Respectability in Early Country Music, is under contract with University of Illinois Press. He is a recipient of research awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Society for American Music, and the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society. In addition to national and international conference presentations, he has also been a featured guest for podcasts, film festivals, and church and civic groups. At Baylor, Dr. Parler teaches courses on popular music, jazz, and 20th- and 21st-century classical repertories. Prior to Baylor, he taught at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

Education

Ph.D., Historical Musicology, Harvard University (2017)

B.Mus., Musical Arts/Piano, Vanderbilt University (2009)

Selected Publications

“Garth Brooks Soundalikes, YouTube Misinformation, and Authenticity Politics,” Journal of Musicology 41:4 (2024): 494–529.

Glenda Goodman and Samuel Parler, “White Noise: Historiographical Exceptionalism and the Construction of a White American Music History,” in Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja (University of Michigan Press, 2021), 207–38

“DeFord Bailey in Country Music’s Multiracial Canon,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73:1 (Spring 2020): 53–94