Baylor's Pruit Memorial Symposium to Focus on Black Gospel Music

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Contact: Lori Fogleman, (254) 710-6275

WACO, Texas (Nov. 6, 2013) - Baylor University will host the 2013 Pruit Symposium, "Marching to Zion: Celebrating and Preserving Black Sacred Music," on Friday Nov. 8 and Saturday Nov. 9 at George W. Truett Theological Seminary on the Baylor campus.

A panel discussion, "Onward Christian Soldiers: Celebrating Black Sacred Music," will take place in the Piper Great Hall at 3:30 p.m. on Friday. The panelists participating in the discussion are Dwandalyn R. Reece, Ph.D., Curator of Music and Performing Arts
at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American history and culture; Emmett G. Price III, Ph.D., associate professor of music and African-American studies at Northeastern University; and Birgitta Johnson, Ph.D., assistant professor of ethnomusicology and African-American studies in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina.

The panel will be moderated by Robert Darden, associate professor of journalism, public relations and new media in Baylor's College of Arts and Sciences. The author of People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, Darden is well known for leading Baylor's Black Gospel Music Restoration Project to identify, acquire, preserve, record and catalogue the most at-risk music from the black gospel music tradition.

Acclaimed soul-stirring gospel group, The Jones Family Singers, will perform at 7 p.m. Friday at the seminary.

On Saturday, a complimentary continental brunch is open to all at 9:30 a.m. Please make reservations for the brunch at www.baylor.edu/Pruit.

The Bells of Joy concert, featuring the last gospel quartet with two original members from the 1950s, will follow the brunch at 11 a.m.

In 1996, Ella Wall Prichard and the late Lev H. Prichard III of Corpus Christi, Texas, established the Pruit Memorial Symposium Endowment Fund in memory of Helen Pruit Matthews and her brothers, Dr. Lee Tinkle Pruit and William Wall Pruit.

For more information about the Pruit Symposium, visit www.baylor.edu/Pruit.

For more information on the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, visit www.baylor.edu/lib/gospel.

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