Charles Hamm, who helped found the field of American popular-music history and was a professor of music at Dartmouth, died of pneumonia Oct. 16, 2011. He was 86.

After serving in the Marine Corps during World War II, Hamm earned a bachelor’s degree from Virginia in 1947. In 1950, he received an M.F.A. in music from Princeton. He taught at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before returning to Princeton and earning a Ph.D. in musicology in 1960. He then held professorships at Tulane, Illinois, and Dartmouth, where he became the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music in 1976.

While starting as a specialist in Renais sance music, he disapproved of the disrespect fellow musicologists had for contemporary popular music. According to The New York Times, “Hamm was one of the first scholars to study the history of American popular music with musicological rigor and sensitivity to complex racial and ethnic dynamics, and both oral and written traditions.”

Hamm wrote two standard texts: Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (1979); and Music in the New World (1983). He was much honored in his field.

Hamm is survived by three sons (including Bruce ’75 and Chris ’78); four grandchildren; and two former wives.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA. 

 
Graduate Class of 1960