Our City. Our Music. Our Writers.

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On September 30th at 7.00 pm, two outstanding Smithsonian Museum curators will present and discuss their recent books and the key insights derived from archival research, field work, and material culture studies that increase our understanding of this quintessential American music and its global influence.

Dwandalyn R. Reece will present Musical Crossroads: Stories Behind the Objects of African American Music, highlighting the curatorial and archival research on the vast array of musical styles and performance traditions that developed the comprehensive collections and exhibits of The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History. John Troutman will present his work on Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey: editing the unpublished manuscript of folklorist Robert Mack McCormick, co-curating an exhibit on McCormickʻs legendary archive; and co-producing a Grammy-nominated, Smithsonian Folkways box set from McCormick’s field recordings.

Dwandalyn R. Reece, Ph.D., is Associate Director for the Humanities at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and served as the museum’s Curator of Music and Performing Arts from 2009 – 2021. She received the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Award for curating NMAAHC’s permanent exhibition Musical Crossroads in 2017 and for her publication Musical Crossroads: Stories Behind the Objects of African American Music in 2025. She collaborates on many Smithsonian programs, including The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap and the Smithsonian Year of Music, and chairs the pan-institutional group, Smithsonian Music. Reece is a board member of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology.

John Troutman, Ph.D., Head of the Division of Culture the Arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, is its award- winning Curator of Music and Musical Instruments, project director and lead curator of its permanent exhibition “Entertainment Nation,” and a prolific author on U.S. popular and vernacular music in the late 19th and 20th centuries.  His work on the edited volume, Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, recently won a Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Award.