Portia K. Maultsby


Portia Katrenia Maultsby is an American ethnomusicologist and educator. She is a professor emerita at Indiana University who specializes in African American music. She founded the university's Archives of African American Music and Culture in 1991.

Biography

Early life and education

Maultsby was born in Orlando, Florida, to Maxie C. and Valdee Maultsby, and grew up in thesegregated American South. Her older brother was psychiatrist Maxie C. Maultsby, Jr.. She also had a twin brother, Casel Hayes Maultsby, a pilot.
Maultsby graduated from Jones High School in Orlando in 1964. She attended Mount St Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, on a music scholarship, graduating in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in piano, theory, and composition. The following year, she earned a master's degree in musicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1974, she was awarded a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she was the first African American to be awarded that degree in the United States.

Career

Maultsby began lecturing at Indiana University in 1971, while still a graduate student. She became the founding director of the Indiana University Soul Revue, a student ensemble dedicated to Black music. By 1975, she was an assistant professor in the Department of African-American Studies. She went on to became chair of the department, then professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.
Maultsby's specialization in African American music spans genres, including funk, soul, rhythm and blues, and spirituals. She founded the university's Archives of African American Music and Culture in 1991, and served as its director from 1991 through 2013. The archives started as Maultsby's personal collection and grew to include more than 10,000 pieces of music and music-related items by 2003.
Maultsby co-edited two textbooks with her Indiana University colleague Mellonee V. Burnim: African American Music: An Introduction and Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation. She wrote the foreword to the 2018 book Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection, edited by Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan.
Maultsby has also served as a consultant for museums and documentary films.''

Selected works

Books

Articles