Dale Cockrell is Director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, Professor of Musicology Emeritus in the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, and a Research Associate of the University of the Free State in South Africa.  He is widely published in the field of American music studies, including Demons of Disorder:  Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (1997), which won the C. Hugh Holman Award; Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers,1842-1846 (1989), recipient of the Irving Lowens Award; The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook (2011); three CDs of music from the Little House books; ten other books and editions; and more than seventy scholarly articles.  He is a former president of the Society for American Music, from which he received the Distinguished Service Award in 2010, and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society.  Cockrell has received three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, among other awards, prizes, and grants.  He has also held appointments to Indiana University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, The College of William and Mary (where he was the David N. and Margaret C. Bottoms Professor of Music and chaired the Department of Music), and the University of Alabama.  While at Vanderbilt, he chaired the Department of Musicology and was for three years the director of the American Studies Program.