My current research is feeding into my blog-and-vlog project, 365 Songs of Cheer. I am curating a collection of cheer-up songs, one for each day of the year, over the course of 2026 and 2027. (See the page for that project, linked on the menu above.)
For each song there will be a video of me singing the song (on YouTube) and both a free blog and a paid Bonus blog (on Substack).
The songs are from the worlds of jazz, Broadway musicals, Hollywood musicals, and Tin Pan Alley (the music publishing business of the early twentieth century).
The free blog is to help people who want basic information about the song that helped to cheer them up, giving links to multiple versions, tips on how to learn the song, and basic information about the songwriters.
The paid Bonus blog is more for aficionados — or for a reader who just must learn more about one or more of their favorite songs.
The project will overlap with my ongoing research about women songwriters of the jazz decades.
More generally, my current interest centers on the maternal – whether you think of it as relating to the mother, or father, or the parental instinct in any person. The focus is on our inner desire to nurture, comfort, and supply peace to another.
Project: Women Songwriters of Tin Pan Alley.
I am researching and analyzing the American popular songs written by women during the period of about 1895 to 1955. I have identified over four hundred women who made major contributions to the Great American Songbook, who between them wrote thousands of songs.
My book on the topic is from the publisher Bloomsbury, under the Rowman and Littlefield imprint, published in March, 2025: Songs She Wrote: Forty Hits by Pioneering Women of Popular Music. (See the “Publications” page for a link to order this book.)
Meanwhile, my research continues, ongoing into the future.
Project: Sad Clown and Torch Singer: Symbols of the Maternal in Classic Hollywood Movies.
The “sad clown” hides their suffering to give the audience a happy, laughter-filled time. The “torch singer” expresses their suffering to give the audience a heart-opening catharsis. Both are desiring to give from their heart, to help the audience, the way a parent wants to help a child. I am analyzing Hollywood movies of the nineteen-twenties through fifties, examining how those clichéd characters are used again and again. Examining their roots in the mythology of the ancient world and in nineteenth-century Romanticism increases our appreciation of their how profound they are.
Project: The Lullaby
I am pursuing a review of literature, surveying psychological and ethnomusicological research on lullabies and lullabying. This will feed in to my teaching of the Lullaby Workshop and my collecting of oral histories about people’s life experiences with story time and lullabying.
Project: The Popularity of Songs in the Tin Pan Alley Era.
Although reference books focus on what songs had best-selling recordings, they ignore other signs of popularity. With the help of digitized databases of Variety and Billboard, I am working to identify songs that were popular through live radio broadcasts, sheet music sales, nightclub performances, and in requests to dance band leaders.
Project: The Interaction of England and America in Making the Great American Songbook.
Many of the great popular songs of the nineteen-twenties through forties were creations of British songwriters, or of American songwriters writing while in England, or of collaborations between the two. I am exploring the extent of these international relationships and the resultant repertoire.