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Rise & Research

Christopher Smith on Music, Coffeehouses and Community Building

By Texas Tech University

January 6^th, 2026

Welcome to Rise & Research where cutting-edge discoveries are made as accessible as your morning coffee. This monthly feature offers a closer look at the transformative research happening on our campus. Pull up a chair as we talk with faculty who are pushing boundaries while creating opportunities for the next generation.

In this installment, Jacob Gordon sits down with Christopher Smith at J&B Coffee Co. to discuss his work at the Vernacular Music Center.

Christopher Smith enters J&B Coffee Co. with the energy of a person coming home. There appears to be a little bounce in his step, as if walking through the coffee shop’s doors relieved some of the tension in his shoulders. He smiles widely as he approaches the counter and checks in with the two baristas working hard to keep the customers well caffeinated.

After placing his order, Smith strolls to the side of the counter where a barista pulls a double shot of espresso. They start trading jokes about a drum part to a song Smiths’ ensemble is practicing.

“This is Anthony, a drummer in my ensemble,” he says, nodding toward the barista. “He’s a doctoral student in percussion and a wonderful, sweet guy.” Smith has been coming to J&B Coffee Co. for 25 years, since he and his wife first moved to Lubbock in 2000. He says it was the community-focused vibes and acoustics that kept him coming back – he is, after all, a professor of musicology at Texas Tech University’s School of Music and the director of the Vernacular Music Center (VMC).

We head toward the back room, Smith confidently leading me on a path he’s probably walked hundreds of times before.

“It’s good coffee and nice people,” Smith says, as we settle at our table. “If you’re here at J&B, you’re here because you value what this place is, whether it’s the coffee, food, space, acoustics, baristas or location. And for me, it was kind of all of those.”

Smith’s research is focused on American music in all periods and genres and 20th century European classical music. Specifically, he’s interested in what he calls “vernacular music.” His work and the mission of the VMC is to provide a home for in-depth interdisciplinary research, and the study and teaching of music and dance from around the world. The center offers graduate and undergraduate level courses and ensembles, giving students a chance to explore and inhabit the material.

Smith and I talk about his work and why community-building is so important to him.

Q: What is vernacular music?

A: It’s a term that doesn’t have such common usage. Some people would refer to these art forms as world music, non-Western music, traditional music or folk music. We like “vernacular” because it comes from the study of language. A vernacular is a language which is spoken to get practical business done. It’s what people speak in the streets to buy and sell things; to worship, celebrate and mourn; to tell stories.

So vernacular music is music that gets social business done. It goes to war or makes us feel love. It helps us remember things and pass along wisdom.

Q: How did you get interested in researching music?

A: I grew up in the suburbs of Boston. I was about 11 years old, a bored, bookish kid. I remember discovering this little coffeehouse where blues and Irish musicians performed. I didn’t know anything about the music but being able to walk into a coffeehouse one night a week – I would go in and wash dishes in the kitchen because that got me free admission.

I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to just sit in the audience and listen to this incredible music that I loved. I had this glimpse of people who were choosing to be a community together. Music was the engine, but the payoff, where they were going together with that engine, was community. An elective community.

Those of us who are lucky enough to find community, find it in different places. For me, it was music. I loved the sound and wanted to make it. And learning how to make the music beautiful taught me the values that made it possible for me to be a member of such communities. And that’s the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself: figuring out that the community of creative artists was a paradise for me.

Q: Can you talk about how the VMC got started?

A: I interviewed at Texas Tech in the summer of 2000 and spoke with the director of the School of Music at the time, Gary Owens. He asked me the standard question, ‘What do you want to be doing in five years’ time?’ I said I want to be publishing and running a small research center about the world’s musics. Dr. Owens said, ‘That’s great. What’s it called?’ And I went, ‘The Vernacular Music Center.’ He said, ‘Great. Make sure you start putting that label on all the work you do so you can start building a track record and a dossier.’ So that’s how it began, and in 2023 the VMC became an officially recognized research center by the Office of Research & Innovation.

Q: Who benefits from the VMC?

A: This is maybe even more important to me personally. The VMC provides the opportunity for young people in our School of Music to encounter art forms that aren’t typically part of a university music program, but which do have value and can enrich their lives while they’re in school. I get kind of emotional when I think about this, but we hope to do for students what the coffeehouse did for me when I was 11 years old. A student hears something and says, ‘I don’t know what that is, but it’s cool. I want to learn how to make that sound.’

Q: How do you see the work you do at the VMC complementing your broader research interests?

A: It’s an opportunity for me to experiment with taking the musical procedures, styles, sounds and instruments of these art forms from around the world and bringing them into a university and arguing for their value. And not just advocating, but teaching, too. All arts teach us and empower us. Each tradition from around the world does it in its own way, which is part of the beautiful diversity of all those expressive arts. It’s a platform to promote these values and musics, and that helps me think about the way I want to advocate in my own writing.

Being engaged in teaching and running ensembles is part of my research. I’ve published pieces in peer reviewed journals about university ensembles and vernacular ensembles within universities. It’s what we’ve done at the center for 25 years, and it works.

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Q: Do you have a vernacular that is currently grabbing your attention?

A: At the age of about 59 or 60 I heard accordion music from south-central France. There’s a style of accordion music used for dancing there called Auvergne music, or now sometimes called Balfolk. I heard that music and saw the dancing. It’s been 45 or 46 years after the first time this happened in the coffeehouse, but I’m still like, ‘I don’t know what that is, but it’s an awesome sound.’ It’s a reaction that led me to being a jazz guitar player, an Appalachian banjo player and a blues slide guitar player. And now? I mostly play French accordion music, and I’m learning French and studying the folklore of the region because that’s what always happens to me. I hear something, I want to play it and then I want to understand the people and the experience from which the music comes.

Q: What do you hope people understand about vernacular music and your work at the VMC?

A: My hope with the VMC is that people who enter its orbit in person – as players, as audience members, as dancers or people who read about it or just encounter those who’ve been through it – feel empowered and equipped to find music.

Q: Why do you choose to conduct your research at Texas Tech?

A: What keeps me here at the School of Music is the sense that everyone is valued and that imagination is precious rather than a problem. I feel like my imagination, the imagination of my colleagues on the staff and the faculty, and the imagination of the students is valued. It is treated as precious and unique rather than problematic or irrelevant.

Q: What does From Here, It’s Possible™ mean to you?

A: From here, it is possible to look outward and upward into the future together. Not alone or inward but outward, across Texas and beyond the Southwest. Upward in a kind of aspirational way, and to do it with other beings, together. I think it comes back to the idea that maybe what I have done over the last half century is to discover and then to be taught, over and over again, that that which is done together is what makes us human.

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WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST?

J&B Coffee Co.

2701 26th St.

Lubbock, Texas 79410

· Poppyseed Muffin

· Americano

· Whole Wheat Bagel with Peanut Butter

· Latte with Oat Milk

About Christopher Smith

Degrees: B.A. University of Massachusetts, 1987; M.M. Indiana University, 1990; Ph.D. Indiana University, 2000

Follow his work on LinkedIn.

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© 2026 Texas Tech University

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