Livingston’s book-signing slated Sept. 20

After spending 22 years researching and studying Charles Faulkner Bryan’s life and work, Dr. Carolyn Livingston has finally realized her dream of having her book in print. The biography, Charles Faulkner Bryan, His Life and Music, was recently published by the University of Tennessee Press.

Dr. Livingston will return to McMinnville for a book-signing Sept. 20 at the Southern Museum and Galleries of Photography, Culture and History, located at 210 E. Main St. in downtown McMinnville.

A Tennessee native, the author is professor and director of Graduate Studies in Music at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Though preoccupied for many years with his music and his life, and singing his praises as a unique, regional American composer, the author never met her subject.

Her mother had taken one of Bryan’s classes at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville and always spoke highly of him as a person and as a teacher.

“Like so many of his students, she acquired from Bryan a sense of value for the folk ballads and hymns of Appalachia, often singing them aloud as she went about her household chores and teaching them to the children in her elementary classes,” Livingston notes in the book’s introduction.

On several occasions, the author visited Edith Hillis Bryan, the widow of the late composer, for special interviews and research at Falconhurst, the home and environment in which the composer grew up. She was visiting there at the time Bryan’s papers were being assembled for transfer to Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville. In addition, Livingston drew upon previously untapped archives containing the papers of Bryan which had already been deposited at the university.

Livingston’s book depicts a “visionary” who mastered composition, education, performance and research, and it contributes to our understanding of the cultural transformations taking place in the south the first half of the 20th Century.

While living in Cookeville for a time and studying at the university, Livingston served as a music teacher and choral director for a couple of years. She anticipates with real excitement and nostalgia the visit to McMinnville, to renew old acquaintances and continue singing the praises of Charles Faulkner Bryan.

The book-signing will begin at 10 a.m. and she will be at the museum until 1 p.m. For additional information, contact the Southern Museum and Galleries at 931-507-8102, [email protected].