Charles Keil
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Ethnomusicologist Charles Keil was born August 12, 1939 in Norwalk, CT. He earned his undergraduate degree in American Studies from Yale University in 1961, and went on to the University of Chicago to earn his MA (1964) and PhD (1979), both in Anthropology. His MA thesis, Urban Blues, won the Roy D. Albert Prize, University of Chicago, for best Master's Thesis, 1963-1964.
His dissertation, Tiv Song, was the product of two years of fieldwork in Nigeria from 1965 to 1967, just before the outburst of the Nigerian Civil War. It was a study of song culture among the Tiv population, who live in nearly classless communities. The book was a co-winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize in 1980.
Keil spent thirty years as an American Studies (AMS) professor at the State University of New York, University at Buffalo before he retired in 2000. Playing an integral role in establishing the PhD program in the AMS department, he helped to make it one of the most prestigious in the country.
Active and outspoken in the University at Buffalo community, Keil was one of the 45 faculty members to be arrested during the 1970 protest against police presence on campus. He and colleague Michael Frisch (aka Vizzy Goth) co-wrote a song, "Hayes Hall Blues," about the incident in order to raise legal defense funds. 45 rpm phonorecord in University Archives collection # 3/5/33, Campus Unrest at the State University of New York at Buffalo Records
A founding member of Buffalo's famous Afro-Latin dance band "Outer Circle Orchestra," Keil also spent time playing with the "12/8 Path Band" and "Biocentrics."
In 1990, Keil co-founded Musicians United for Superior Education, Inc. (M.U.S.E). M.U.S.E. is a unique not-for-profit organization of artists and educators dedicated to increasing children's access to culturally diverse performing-arts instruction. "Activity and participation in a music-dance tradition prepares children for a life well-lived at many deep and mostly unconscious levels-how to be in time, in tune, in graceful synchrony with other people, how to be an energetic presence and shining individual in tight relationships with many others simultaneously," he says. "We have to reinvent the traditions before they're completely gone."
The papers of Charles Keil are housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Additional papers are available at University Archives at the University at Buffalo. The finding aid for the papers is available online.
For more information about Charles Keil, see:
12/8 Path website
Born to Groove website
Music Grooves website
For more information about Buffalo's Polish history, as chronicled in Polka Happiness, see:
Polish American Heritage in Buffalo and Erie County
Bibliography:
 Tiv Song, University of Chicago Press, 1979. |
 Polka Happiness, Temple University Press, 1992. |
 My Music, Wesleyan University Press, 1993. |
 Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, University of Chicago Press, 1994. |
 Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2002. |
