Dr. Eric Crawford

Dr. Eric Crawford

Advisor - Black University

Eric Crawford is interim chair of the music department at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from The Catholic University of America. His research focuses on the rich tradition of Gullah music, specifically the retentions and alterations that have occurred since the antebellum period. Beginning in 2007, he conducted extensive field recordings on Saint Helena Island, site of the historic Port Royal Experiment, and his transcriptions are held at the Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. An outgrowth of this work was the Saint Helena Island Gullah Spirituals Project, which brought together noted scholars and students to preserve and foster the study of the earliest recorded Negro spirituals. In 2013, the Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University published his field interviews in a CD and accompanying booklet entitled Gullah: The Voice of an Island.

His work on historic Sandy Island led to the 2017 publication At Low Tide: The Voices of Sandy Island. This booklet and interactive multi-media project highlight the rich history of Sandy Island and the need to ensure this island’s continued survival. As part of this effort, the National Park Service awarded Coastal Carolina University an African American Civil Rights grant to rebuild the island’s historic school and create an interactive cultural center. Since 2018, Crawford has worked on the Gullah Geechee Digital Project, which digitizes more than 6,900 historic records from plantation journals, musical transcriptions, and contemporary oral histories. In 2021, he appeared in Henry Louis Gates’ miniseries “The Black Church” and was music consultant for the Amazon miniseries “The Underground Railroad.” His books are Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands (University of South Carolina Press, 2021) and Gullah Culture in America (Blair Publishing, 2023).