The Heretical Heart of Americana

In this three-lecture series, Matt Marble explores the magical thought and radical spirit at the heart of Americana music.

Artist, author, and director of the American Museum of Paramusicology Matt Marble explores the magical thought and radical spirit at the heart of Americana music. Tracing the spiritual origins of jazz, the liminal life of country music, and the radical vision behind Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, these talks hone in on the free spirit humming through these folk traditions. Rather than the sanitized and sentimental vision of the past it’s so often marketed to be, Americana music is naturally diverse, alive with inspired innovation, eccentric soulfulness, and radical comedy.

We find each of these genres thrived by a trickster-like nature, slipping around institutional authority and refusing cultural containment. Anchored in magical and animist beliefs, raw experience and crazy wisdom, they treat democracy as a way of being rather than a mere ideal. Only after their cultural impact was deemed profitable, were they coopted and codified into commercial genres. Here we strip the packaging away to reveal their original, free spirit. Together, these three talks celebrate the heretical heart of America and invite us to participate in its vital renewal today.

Matt Marble (b. Meridian, Mississippi, 1979) is an artist, media producer, and the director of the American Museum of Paramusicology (“brilliant and humbling,” The Paris Review). He is the author of Buddhist Bubblegum: Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell hailed by the New York Times as “groundbreaking work.” His creative practice and archival research explore the intersections of music and metaphysics in American history. He is the creator of the podcasts Secret Sound and The Hidden Present, the editor of the AMP Journal, and the curator of the archival exhibition I Hear Strange Music at NYU’s Occult Humanities Conference. Featured by Warp Records, Mississippi Records, Dublab Radio, and the Philosophical Research Society, his work has been presented internationally and supported by a research fellowship at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, a B.A. in Speech & Hearing Science from Portland State University, and a black rattlesnake from his dreams.