Music Library exhibition celebrates Yale’s first professor of jazz as oral historian

The multimedia exhibition “Willie Ruff: In Jazz and in the World” is on display in the Gilmore Music Library corridor through March 15. The photographs, video clips, and documents on view celebrate the life and work of the university’s first professor of jazz: former Music professor Willie Ruff ’53, MFA ’54, ’18 HON.

Materials in the vitrines show Ruff in the company of his wide circle of collaborators and friends: legendary musicians Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, Benny Carter, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Bessie Jones, Ethel Waters, and others. On the three video monitors, excerpts of Ruff’s interviews with these renowned musicians alternate with audio and film clips of solo and group performances—including Bessie Smith’s rendering of “Sink ’Em Low,” a chain-gang work song she had heard prisoners sing in Dawson, Georgia, when she was growing up there.

The interviews

The exhibition also celebrates Willie Ruff as an oral historian. In the early 1970s, Ruff conducted interviews with jazz greats (including 19 interviews with Bessie Smith) as part of a project he was planning to contribute to the Rockefeller Foundation’s project to document the musical history of the United States for the American Bicentennial. Ruff’s plan was to turn these interviews into a long-playing recording. The recording was never made, but nine of Ruff’s interviews from that project are now part of the Oral History of American Music (OHAM) at Yale Library and available on Archives at Yale.

An interview with Ruff himself, conducted by Brian Meacham, managing archivist of the Yale Film Archive, is also on view, along with Ruff’s film, “Tony Williams in Africa,” and an episode of  “What’s Happening,” a Hartford television station series. The TV segment, also shown in its entirety in the exhibition, features performances by and interviews with Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, and other recipients of Yale’s Duke Ellington Fellowship Medal.

The Duke Ellington Fellowship

In 1972, one year after joining Yale’s Music faculty, Ruff brought more than 40 musicians to Woolsey Hall to launch a program he named the “Conservatory without Walls.” Then fYale President Kingman Brewster and Yale School of Music Dean Philip Nelson supported Ruff in the effort.

Marian Anderson, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and Mary Lou Williams were among the first artists and mentors in what became the Duke Ellington Fellowship program, named for the jazz legend. Yale University established an endowment fund for the fellowship to expand the study of African American music. In the program’s 30 years, Duke Ellington Fellows introduced an estimated 180,000 New Haven public schoolchildren to African American musical traditions.

The lead curator of “Willie Ruff: In Jazz and in the World” is Music librarian Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy, with assistance from Brendan Galvin, Daniella Posy, Eva Heater, Ruthann McTyre, Rebecca Tinker, and Eric Sonnenberg.

Read more about Willie Ruff and the Conservatory without Walls.

Watch a Mondays at Beinecke conversation with curator Suzanne Lovejoy and Libby Van Cleve, director of OHAM.

View the online exhibition “A Riff on Ruff: Yale’s Jazz Ambassador to the World.”

Listen to audio clips of Bessie Smith telling Ruff about the chain-gang song “Sink ’Em Low” and read the transcripts of the conversation.

Search for the two digitized films—“Tony Williams in Africa” and “What’s Happening”—in the Yale Film Archive collection and read Meacham’s accompanying film notes.

Read more about the Oral History of American Music collection.

Listen to the Willie Ruff interviews with jazz greats and listen to a Q&A with Ruff, Meacham, and Van Cleve at the Whitney Humanities Center in 2020 through the Aviary online streaming platform.

—Deborah Cannarella

Images (clockwise): Bessie Smith, Benny Carter, Eubie Black, Louis Armstrong; photo collage by Monica Reed