(One of a series of releases on Delta Blues Symposium X)

Arkansas State University will host "Delta Blues Symposium X: The 1950s," the 10th installment of an annual conference held each spring on the Jonesboro campus.

The event, scheduled for Thursday through Saturday, March 25-27, is sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy with assistance from the Department of Music, Department of Theatre, Department of Political Science, Heritage Studies Ph.D. Program, Office of the President, and Museum.

This year’s Symposium will begin Thursday morning, March 25, with undergraduate students presenting ethnographic descriptions of traditional music performances in the Delta. The afternoon’s sessions will be devoted to Delta literature and Delta life ways. All these sessions will meet in the ASU Museum, 110 Cooley Dr.

At 4 in the afternoon, the play “Lonesome Tonight” by Jim Tyler Anderson, Playwright-in-Residence at Texas A&M University–Commerce, will be presented in the Black Box Theatre in the Fowler Center, 201 Olympic Dr. Directed by Stacy Alley, the play deals with Elvis Presley and the 1950s.

Rockabilly pioneers Billy Lee Riley and Sonny Burgess will perform in concert in the Drama Theatre, Fowler Center, at 8 Thursday evening.

The Symposium will reconvene Friday morning, March 26, at 8:30 in the ASU Museum with concurrent sessions on Mississippi Writers and on Rock and Rockabilly. Another set of concurrent sessions–on Delta writer Beverly Lowry and on Elvis and Memphis Music–will begin at 10:30.

Friday afternoon will highlight Bluesmen and Komunyakaa and Contemporary Poetry, concurrent sessions starting at 1:30.

At 4 in Museum 182, Joel Williamson, Lineberger Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, will deliver one of the Symposium’s featured lectures, “The Elvis Girls.”

Symposium activities move to the Fowler Center’s Grand Hall at 8 on Friday evening for a fiction reading by Cary Holladay and a poetry reading by John Bensko. Both are members of the creative writing faculty at the University of Memphis.

Saturday morning, March 27, begins at 8:30 will fiction and poetry workshops for pre-enrolled participants directed by Holladay and Bensko. Sessions scheduled in the Museum for 8:30 deal with Brown v. Board and Music from the Delta and Beyond. Morning activities conclude with a session of Delta writers reading from their creative work.

The theatre of the Fowler Center will be the setting for three events on Saturday afternoon: a panel on The Integration of Hoxie, moderated by Calvin Smith and featuring Tom Dillard of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, DoVeanna Fulton of the University of Memphis, Robert L. Jenkins from Mississippi State University, and Ben Johnson of South Arkansas University at 1:30; a screening of the film “Hoxie: The First Stand” at 3:15; and a featured lecture by former U.S. Senator Dale Bumpers entitled “Brown v. Board and the Damage of Delays” at 4:30.

The Symposium concludes with a concert of works by Delta composers in Riceland Hall of the Fowler Center. This event begins at 8 and is organized by the Department of Music.

Throughout the Symposium the ASU Museum will be exhibiting the photographs of Ernest Withers.

For further information, contact the Department of English and Philosophy at 870-972-3043 or visit the Symposium website at www.clt.astate.edu/blues.

All Symposium events are free and open to the public.

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