2018 - Distinguished Service Award

Alan L. Spurgeon is Professor of Music Education and Director of Graduate Studies in Music at the University of Mississippi where he teaches graduate research courses and supervises dissertations and thesis projects. He holds a bachelors degree in music education from Truman State University in Missouri, an MM in music education from the University of Arkansas, and a Ph.D. in music education from the University of Oklahoma where he studied with Melvin Platt and Roger Rideout. After teaching public school music for seven years  in Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas, he taught eighteen years at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. He is now in his seventeenth year at Ole Miss. He is the author of various research articles on the history of music education in the United States and has also done considerable study in Anglo-American folk music. He is the author of Waltz the Hall: the American Play Party published in 2005.