I’m an Applied Folklorist, Ethnomusicologist, and Country Blues Practitioner

Lamont Jack Pearley is the executive director and founder of Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation and the founder, editor-in-chief, publisher of The African American Folklorist Magazine. An applied folklorist and ethnomusicologist, Pearley was inducted into the New York Blues Hall of Fame as a Great Blues Historian, TV/Radio Producer, and Great Blues Artist. His work focuses on the conservation and sustainability of blues and black traditions through performance, documentation, and a repository of ethnographic interviews. Pearley has a desire to teach and advocate for underrepresented students at the university level, while working with communities to create sustainable cultural experiences and programming through curricula, workshops, and more.  Pearley earned his Master’s degree in Folk Studies from Western Kentucky University and is currently enrolled in the Ethnomusicology doctoral program at the University of Indiana Bloomington.   

Pearley specializes in Acoustic Delta Country Blues and Field Hollers Performance; his scholarship has developed his interviewing, documenting, and raising awareness of African American Traditional Music, Folklore, Folklife, Narrative, Oral History, and the American Black Experience. Pearley created repositories and archives that have contributed to various websites, special collections, magazines, and Academic Curricula.

Pearley utilizes his musicianship and multiple media platforms to present engaging, meaningful, and historically accurate content that explores, highlights, and raises cultural and ethnic awareness of African American Traditional Music and the Black Experience. His journey in the discipline began long before he stepped into a classroom looking to earn a graduate degree in Folklore and Ethnomusicology. As an NYC-born descendant of the Great Migration, Pearley’s life changed dramatically in the early 2000s when he returned to Louisiana and Mississippi to bury close relatives. Returning to these regions and their deep associations with Blues history, Pearley felt such an urgency to document and present African-American Traditional Music, folklore, and folklife as they pertain to the Black Experience; he stopped rapping and fully immersed himself in acoustic blues guitar playing and traditional singing overnight. Essentially, Pearley became a practitioner of Prewar Blues.  He also began conducting ethnographic field interviews to trace his family’s lineage, leading to interviewing anyone he could find with similar stories, such as African-American Blues musicians. That work led him to pursue a Masters in Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University, where he learned the field’s history, theory, methods, and application, now enrolled in the Ethnomusicology PhD Program at Indiana University. STILL PERFORMING!