Marva Griffin Carter

Marva Griffin Carter is an American musician, composer, musicologist, and author. She has worked as an academic administrator and professor at Georgia State University since 1993. In 2020 the Society for American Music recognized her work with a Lifetime Achievement Award, granted "in recognition of the recipient's significant and substantial lifetime achievement in scholarship, performance, teaching, and/or support of American Music."

The subject of her master's thesis at Boston University was the composer Hall Johnson. Her PhD dissertation was titled The life and music of Will Marion Cook.

She has spoken of a serendipitous meeting in 1970 with the musicologist Eileen Southern, who inspired her to pursue an academic career, saying of the encounter, "[she] basically recruited me," and "I would not have achieved what I have, or even pursued my areas of interest were it not for her."

Work and career Carter began her academic career as coordinator of the African American Studies Program at Simmons University, Boston. She was the 1998 Barbara Jordan/W. E. B. DuBois Award for Outstanding Teaching recipient.

Her book Swing Along: The Musical life of Will Marion Cook was published in 2008.

Carter was the organist for Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. She is also writing a book about the sacred musical traditions and repertoire of the historic church.

Personal life Griffin Carter is married to the historian and civil rights scholar Lawrence Carter. They have one son, Lawrence Edward Carter Jr.

Publications Griffin Carter, Marva. Hall Johnson – Preserver of the Old Negro Spiritual (1880–1970). www.worldcat.org. Retrieved 2023-03-24. (Master's thesis, Boston University, 1975) The "New Negro" Choral Legacy of Hall Johnson, Chorus and community, Ahlquist, Karen, ed. (2006). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. . Weisenfeld, Judith (2011). "The Secret at the Root": Performing African American Religious Modernity in Hall Johnson's Run, Little Chillun. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. 21 (1): 39–80. Carter, Marva Griffin (2008). Swing along: the musical life of Will Marion Cook. Oxford University Press. Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography, Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020) 73 (3): 711–784.