Mark Tucker Award

Black and white portrait of a man in a suit and tie, with short dark hair, looking at the camera and smiling slightly, set against a plain background.

Description

Mark Tucker, Vice President of the Society for American Music at the time of his death in December 2000, is known to most SAM members as a leading jazz scholar. His Ellington: The Early Years and The Duke Ellington Reader are landmarks in Ellington scholarship and models of musical biography. But Mark was deeply interested in many aspects of American music besides jazz. He wrote papers, participated in performances, and published pieces dealing with topics as diverse as Charles Ives’s love of the Adirondacks, 19th-century parlor song, the compositions of Alec Wilder, the musical plays of Braham, Harrigan, and Hart, and hip-hop.

Recognizing Mark’s gift for nurturing and inspiring his own students and the high value he placed on skillful and communicative scholarly writing, and wishing to honor his memory, the Board of the Society for American Music has established the Mark Tucker Award, to be presented at the Business Meeting of the annual SAM conference to a student who has written an outstanding paper for delivery at that conference. The recipient of the award, which consists of a modest amount of cash and a more significant amount of recognition, will be decided before the conference by a committee appointed annually.

Eligibility

Students who will be reading individual papers or presenting a poster are eligible for the Mark Tucker Award. Note: Seminar papers are not eligible for the Tucker Award.

Application Requirements

In addition to the application form, please supply a research paper that fits within the time slot of the conference’s twenty-minute individual paper presentation limit (approximately ten double-spaced pages).

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Deadline

February 10

Past Winners

Year	Winners
2026	Joseph Z. Johnson, "My Banjo Still Thinks It’s a Tree: Black Lutherie, Land, and the Politics of Sonic Materiality"
2025	Ken Tianyuan Ge, "Crowd Goes Mild: Elder Audiences, Musical Amenities, and Collective Underwhelm in Florida’s Snowbird Communities"
2024	Chloe Smith, "Black Temporalities in the Wake: Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’ (1963) and AMYRA’s ‘Burning in Birmingham’ (2016)"
2023	Matthew Mendez, “Haunted House Blues: Bessie Smith, Vocal Possessions, and the Time of Redress”
2022	Maeve Nagel-Frazel, “Mapping the Camilla Urso Concert Company on the Nineteenth Century Lyceum Circuit, 1873–83”
2020	April P. Morris, “Composing a Nation in Crisis: Musical Americanism and U.S. National Identity in Ellie Siegmeister’s Vietnam War Works”
2019	Brian Miller, “Jazz, but with Robots: Style and Aesthetics in Human-Computer Improvisation”
2018	Katie Callam, “Advocating for ‘the old songs which their ancestors sang’: Kitty Cheatham as Curator of African-American Spirituals”
2017	Brian Wright, “Re-Writing the History of Motown: The James Jamerson/Carol Kaye Controversy”
2016	Samuel Parler, “Racial Nationalism and Class Ambivalence in Carson Robison’s World War II Songs”
2015	Michael Uy, “Staging Catfish Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company and Porgy and Bess, 1955–1956”
2014	Hannah Lewis, “Love Me Tonight (1932) and the Development of the Integrated Film Musical”
2013	Emily M. Gale, “Sentimental Songs for Sentimental Men”
2012	Glenda Goodman, “A ‘Phrenzy of Accomplishments’; or, the Power of Sentimental Songs”
2011	Dana C. Gorzelany-Mostak, “The Hip-Hop Dalai Lama vs. An American Girl: Soundscapes, Ideology, and American Identity in the 2008 Democratic Primary”
2010	William Cheng, “A Question of Co-Hobbitation: Towards a Musical Democracy in The Lord of the Rings Online”
2009	Christine Fena, “The ‘Piano Technician’ and his ‘Unfortunate Piano’: Henry Cowell in the Machine Age”
2008	Loren Kajikawa, “Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’: Signifyin(g) Whiteness, Rearticulating Race”
2007	Nathan Platte, “The Happy Farmer, the Silent Cinema, and the Art of Musical Quotation in Herbert Stothart’s Score for The Wizard of Oz (1939)”
2006	Jessica Courtier, “Vocal Fantasies: Race, Masculinity, and Vocal Performance in Rudy Vallee’s Musical Doctor and Louis Armstrong’s Rhapsody in Black and Blue”
2005	Bethany Kissell, “Bernstein’s Personal Statement: Jewish and American Identity in the Jeremiah”
2004	Larry Hamberlin, “Caruso and His Cousins: Portraits of Italian Americans in the Operatic Novelty”
2003	Jewel A. Smith, “Education Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century American Female Seminaries: Music and the ‘Ideal of Real Womanhood’”
2002	Charles Hiroshi Garrett, “Louis Armstrong and the Sound of Migration”