Portia K. Maultsby facts for kids

Portia Katrenia Maultsby (born June 11, 1947) is an important American expert in music and education. She is a retired professor from Indiana University Bloomington. She specializes in studying African-American music. She also started a special place called the Archives of African American Music and Culture in 1991. This archive helps keep a lot of history about Black music safe.

About Portia Maultsby

Growing Up and Her Education

Portia Maultsby was born in Orlando, Florida. She grew up in the southern United States during a time when Black and white people were kept separate by law. This was called segregation. Her older brother, Maxie C. Maultsby, Jr., became a psychiatrist. She also had a twin brother, Casel Hayes Maultsby, who was a pilot.

Portia Maultsby finished Jones High School in Orlando in 1964. She then went to Mount St Scholastica College (now Benedictine College) in Atchison, Kansas. She studied piano, music theory, and composition there, graduating in 1968. The next year, she earned a master's degree in music from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1974, she earned her PhD in ethnomusicology from the same university. She was the first African American person in the United States to get this degree.

Her Career in Music

Portia Maultsby started teaching at Indiana University in 1971. She was still a student herself at the time. She was asked by Dr. Herman Hudson to help start the Indiana University Soul Revue. This was a student group that performed Black music. By 1975, she was an assistant professor in the Department of African-American Studies.

In 1977, Maultsby helped produce a song called "Music is Just a Party" for her student group. This song was chosen as Billboard's top single in a special category. She later became the head of her department from 1985 to 1991. After that, she became a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 1992.

Maultsby is an expert in many kinds of African-American music. This includes funk, soul, rhythm and blues, and spirituals. She started the university's Archives of African American Music and Culture in 1991. She was the director of these archives from 1991 until 2013. The archives began with Maultsby's own collection of music items. By 2003, it had grown to include over 10,000 pieces. These pieces include interviews, photographs, and recordings.

Maultsby also helped write two important textbooks with her colleague Mellonee V. Burnim. These books are African American Music: An Introduction (2006) and Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation (2016). She also wrote the introduction for the 2018 book Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection.

In 2011, Maultsby received an award from a group that studies African American music. She has also worked as an advisor for museums, like the Smithsonian Institution in 1985. She has also been a researcher for documentary films, including the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. She has given advice on many projects, such as "The Motown Sound" and "Chicago’s Record Row."