Dr. Eric Crawford
Claim to fame: Gullah Geechee music ethnographer and educator; associate professor of musicology at Claflin University.
By the book: Author of Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands.
Tech savvy: Contributed to the Free and Equal app—a public history audio tour of Reconstruction-era Beaufort County that includes recorded versions of Gullah music sung by his students.
Passion project: Reconnecting Gullah songs with their original West African and Central African languages. “That would really be showing these songs’ unique heritage and that they aren’t as easy as people say.”
Long before Eric Crawford received his Ph.D., and even long before he became an expert in Gullah Geechee spirituals and work songs, music was in his soul.
“I was probably four or five years old,” he says, “and my mother, Bessie Foster Crawford, recalls I would come home from church, and I would go to the couch and begin hitting the couch as if I was playing the piano. That’s how I became a musician.”
Crawford earned a bachelor’s degree in music education and a master’s degree in piano performance at Norfolk State University. While working on his doctorate at The Catholic University of America, he read a research paper on Gullah Geechee music and was inspired to learn more. “My quest, as I began my own research, was to try to figure out if this music from the antebellum period, when it was first transcribed, was still being done 150 years later.”
That quest brought him to South Carolina and Saint Helena Island, where he discovered singers in their late 70s and 80s still singing songs handed down through multiple generations. Crawford hired on with Coastal Carolina University in 2014 and worked with Dr. Matthew White, current director of jazz studies at the University of South Carolina, to record and document the enduring legacy of Gullah Geechee music in the modern era.
Through his work, Crawford hopes to keep the music ringing in the voices of new generations.
“These older singers in their 80s, eventually they won’t be able to sing these songs anymore,” he says. “And so, it’s about having the youth know these songs but then to reimagine them in their own way.”