Julia Simon Interview
Julia Simon is a professor and scholar, as well as a bassist and singer. Her new book is Debt and Redemption in the Blues: The Call for Justice, which “explores concepts of freedom and bondage in the blues and argues that the genre of music explicitly calls for a reckoning while expressing faith in a secular justice to come.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I have been playing music since I was 8 years old. I played classical flute up through high school and wanted to go to a music conservatory. My parents were vehemently opposed and insisted that I attend a regular university. I started out as a music major, but found ear-training, sight-singing, piano, and theory to be grueling. I switched to a major in French, but always kept up interdisciplinary interests, including in history, philosophy, English and American literature, and music. During my undergraduate years I more or less stopped playing music. I got an MA and PhD in French and settled on a specialization in the eighteenth century. That afforded me the opportunity for endless interdisciplinary work.
I returned to playing music when I started missing it during my daughter's piano lessons. I took up drums and started playing in a blues band with my husband. My passion for music returned and I shifted my research focus to music. I wrote a book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's music theory in relation to his social and political thought (Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics). I then started teaching courses on the blues, wrote an article on the blues, and never looked back. I have now written three books on the blues: Time in the Blues (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson: Blues, Race Identity (Penn State University Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Debt and Redemption in the Blues: The Call for Justice (Penn State University Press, 2023), and a few articles.