Hutton Honors College

Right to Rock: Supper with
Rock Musician Kamara Thomas
and Rock Music Critic Kandia Crazy Horse

Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009 * 5:30-7 p.m. * HHC Building (811 E. Seventh St.) * SIGN-UP REQUIRED

Join Kamara Thomas, vocalist, guitarist, and pianist, and rock critic Kandia Crazy Horse for supper and an informal conversation about the life of rock musicians and about the past, present, and future of rock music. Where is it going? Who gets to say? Who gets to play? Who listens?

"Rock your faces, mix the races" is the tagline of multi-racial rock band Earl Greyhound, which has been hailed "the Afrofuture of Rock" in The Village Voice. Join Kamara Thomas, vocalist, guitarist, and pianist, for supper and an informal conversation about her life as a rock musician with Earl Greyhound, a band sometimes described as a blues-rock band but "as heavy as Led Zeppelin," according to Spin Magazine. How does a band get the right sound? get the right musicians? get gigs? stay relevant? Is hard rock a hard life? harder for women than men? The band (whose name is a lighthearted cross of Earl Grey tea and the Greyhound bus line) started out in 2002 as a piano and guitar duo with Kamara Thomas and Matt Whyte. It recorded its first full-length album, Soft Targets, in 2005 but instead of releasing it, the duo set out to make itself a trio, playing a show every week in search of "their dream drummer," who turned out to be Ricc Sheridan. The release of Soft Targets in 2006 earned rave reviews in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker. The band has toured in the United States, Canada, and Japan and is set to release its second album this fall. Check out the EG sound here or here.

Kandia Crazy Horse is the editor of Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock and Roll, and she was the 2008-9 recipient of a distinguished fellowship in American Studies at Princeton University, where she taught a course called "Roll Over Beethoven: Black Rock and Cultural Revolt" and organized a symposium on Southern rock that explored the contributions of the South as well as its darker legacies.

Both Thomas and Crazy Horse will be on campus for Reclaiming the Right to Rock: Black Experiences in Rock Music, a two-day conference (Nov. 13-14) hosted by the Archives of African American Music and Culture. The discussion supper is co-sponsored by the Hutton Honors College and the Wells Scholars Program.

Current Programs | Extracurricular Home