Carrie Tipton

Adjunct Instructor of Musicology

Carrie Allen Tipton writes, lectures, and teaches about music, religion, history, and culture, especially of the U.S. South. She has published in ESPN’s The Undefeated, History Today, Pop Matters, Deep South Magazine, the Southern Foodways Alliance blog, W.W. Norton's Avid Listener, Religion Dispatches, the New Encyclopedia of the South, Black Music Research Journal, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and more. Her article on minstrel songs in southern college football was a finalist in the 2022 Associated Press Sports Editors’ contest and she is currently writing a book for Vanderbilt University Press, a cultural history of Southeastern Conference fight songs.

Tipton has lectured at and/or appeared on panels for Bach Society Houston (Texas), Houston Ebony Opera Guild, Nashville's WriterFest, National Museum of African American Music, and other organizations. She has presented her research at Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and at meetings of the Southern American Studies Association, Society for American Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, and New York University’s Music and the Moving Image Conference.

While researching Black gospel music in Georgia, she facilitated the donation of the Parade of Quartets collection to the University of Georgia Media Archives. Containing hundreds of hours of rare footage of Black gospel music from the southeastern United States, the collection has been digitized through a Digital Library of Georgia grant. Tipton, a member of the Editorial Board of the American Bach Society, hosts the Notes on Bach podcast for Bach Society Houston, in its sixth season, and coordinates the Tiny Bach Concert video series for the American Bach Society.

Prior to moving to Nashville, Tipton was Director of the Lecture Series for Bach Society Houston, taught piano at a Houston music studio, and was Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Houston-Downtown. A longtime church musician and collaborative pianist, Tipton holds a Ph.D. in Musicology/Ethnomusicology and M.Mus. in Piano Performance (Collaborative Piano) from the University of Georgia and a B.Mus.Ed. from Mississippi State University. At Vanderbilt she teaches a course on Music, Sports, and Society.