Candace Bailey (NHC Fellow, 2019–20; 2025–26)

Candace Bailey is the Neville Distinguished Professor of the Visual and Performing Arts at North Carolina Central University. She has published widely on seventeenth-century English music, women and music in the nineteenth-century US South, and is completing a book on Edmond Dédé’s opera Morgiane (Bordeaux, 1887) to be published with Cambridge University Press. Her 2021 monograph Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South (completed at the National Humanities Center) won an Academic Choice Award and an NEH Fellows Open Book Award. She has also just completed an NEH Humanities Collections and Research Resources Grant with colleagues at the University of North Texas that concerns the collection, sharing, and mapping of metadata for women’s music materials in the nineteenth-century US.

Among her upcoming projects are a short course on reading women’s culture through binder’s volumes (Hanover and Vienna), research on genius and the concept of the work in terms of gender in Regency England, and a keynote presentation at the Chopin Institute (Warsaw). She continues to work on women and music in Regency England, Dédé’s music in a variety of contexts, and women collectors across cultures. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, an Albi Rosenthal Fellowship at the Bodleian Library, and other organizations.

Selected Publications

• Bailey, Candace. “Black Women and the Cultural Performance of Music in Mid-Nineteenth Century Natchez,” American Nineteenth Century History 24, no. 3 (2024): 1–24.
• Bailey, Candace. “Music and Black Gentility in the Antebellum and Civil War South,” in special colloquy issue on Music and Race in Early America, Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 3 (2021): 600–10.
• Bailey, Candace. Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth Century South. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2021.
• Bailey, Candace. “‘Remember Those Beautiful Songs’: Preserving Antebellum Cultural Practices Through Music Collection During the Civil War,” American Music 38, no. 3, (2020): 262–302.
• Bailey, Candace. Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2019.

Fellowship Work Summary, 2019–20

Candace Bailey completely organized Unbinding Gentility: Southern Women Musicians in the Nineteenth Century, including a substantial revision of the first two chapters. She wrote, submitted, and revised “‘Remember Those Beautiful Songs’: Preserving Cultural Practices Through Music Collection,” forthcoming in American Music, 38/3. The colloquy paper “Interrogating Musical Practices Among Women of Color in Antebellum Slave States” will be part of a special issue on race and early American music for the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She wrote two chapters for edited volumes: “Definition and Dissemination of Popular Song in the Southern United States,” forthcoming in Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Derek B. Scott (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, forthcoming); and “‘She takes up music as a profession’: Women organists in Reconstruction Mobile, Alabama,” in Hidden Narratives of Women and Music, edited by Paula Bishop and Kendra Leonard (forthcoming, University of Mississippi Press).