Portia Maultsby

Portia Maultsby’s work at IU made the university a leader in her field

From the time she arrived in Bloomington, Portia Maultsby was a major influence on Indiana University. Dr. Maultsby’s laundry list of accomplishments include establishing the IU Soul Revue; recommending the formation of choral and dance ensembles, later named the African American Choral Ensemble and African American Dance Company (products of more students auditioning for the Soul Revue than spaces available), the two other performance ensembles in IU’s African American Arts Institute (AAAI); seminal work as a professor in what’s now known as IU’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS); and founding IU’s Archives of African American Music and Culture.

But when reflecting on her time at IU, Maultsby—who’s now retired and living between South Carolina and her home state of Florida—doesn’t focus on what she helped build. Instead, her greatest pride comes from who she helped build—through what she tried to instill in her students.

“I wanted to help students realize their potential and empower themselves. Over the years, I had students who came to me and said, ‘I couldn’t sing or play an instrument, but you gave me an opportunity to be in the Soul Revue as part of the stage crew, lighting crew, or sound crew.’ I knew I had very talented students,” she said. “Some who would very easily move on and have professional performing careers. But I also wanted to find the hidden talent in others and to facilitate the graduation of my students. I was equally interested in contributing to their understanding of self and the need to reach for the highest goals in life, rather than settle for just getting by.”

That’s why she’s one of an exclusive set of individuals IU’s Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (OVPDEMA) is honoring in commemoration of the university’s annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration. Professor Emeritus Maultsby’s pioneering work is a tribute to the living legacy of Dr. King.

In 1971, when Maultsby first stepped foot on the IU Bloomington campus, it was a far different place than what students, faculty, and staff see today. There was no Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center or AAAI, and AAADS, then known as the Afro-American Studies Department, was just a fledging program. But that was soon to change, thanks to the vision of Dr. Herman Hudson, who recruited a cohort of young, African American faculty members to IU through a strategic plan.

Maultsby first became known to Hudson through the late Distinguished Professor David Baker of IU’s Jacobs School of Music. Baker headed IU’s new Jazz Studies program, and he and two other faculty members had established the Black Music Center within Jacobs. In 1969, the center hosted a summer symposium focused on African American music, which Maultsby attended.

At the time, Maultsby was a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology minoring in African American Studies and African Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A year later, Hudson began recruiting Maultsby and other African American doctoral students in various disciplines to IU, believing that getting a head start on promising young faculty before they finished their degrees would benefit the university. His prophecy proved to be true.

I’m very proud of all of them and I’m pleased by the way my career developed at Indiana University. There are markers of success and for me—they are how the students benefited from the programs and the time invested in them, and after they left, their careers flourished.

Eventually, Hudson had formed a group of prospective recruits and arranged for them to meet up periodically so they could get to know each other better and have a sense of community in advance. Prior to one of these meetings, Maultsby informed Hudson that she would be unable to attend, as her own ensemble, “Portia and the Soul Syndicate”—from her teen years, Maultsby always formed groups and performed—had shows to play elsewhere, coincidentally in Indiana.

Undeterred, Hudson made a trip to Terre Haute, Ind., where Maultsby was performing at St. Mary’s of the Woods College and Indiana State University, and after seeing her direct the sound check, came upon a brainstorm.

“That’s when he became aware of my background in the performing arts and beyond academics. At Indiana University, he attended talent shows organized by black students each semester, and he was impressed by the talent,” Maultsby recalled. “Dr. Hudson was interested, from the beginning, in establishing Afro-American Studies (AAS) around arts and the humanities. He had already moved in that direction.

“Dr. Hudson said, ‘What we need to do, in a formal way, is organize these students so they can receive formal instruction in performing black popular music from a full-time faculty member.’ That gave him the idea of what I could contribute to African American Studies. He said, ‘I want you to organize the same ensemble as you have now, but at Indiana University and with black students.’”

When Maultsby came to Bloomington, she taught courses on the general history of African American music in the Jacobs School of Music, as Baker had first imagined. But within Afro-American Studies, the department in which she was housed, she also taught “Soul Music, Culture, and Performance,” the class in which students in the Soul Revue enrolled in.

“Dr. Hudson was very strategic in developing the curriculum. He established the ensembles as part of the curriculum, rather than an extracurricular activity, as did most schools, led by students or a non-university instructor. We were on the forefront of doing this, and the only school that did so as a credit-bearing course in Afro-American Studies,” Maultsby explained. “Dr. Hudson's approach was based on the principle that ensembles integral to the curriculum and instructed by full-time faculty were less likely to become targets for elimination during a financial crisis. Dr. Hudson wanted to ensure the longevity of these ensembles and a level of instruction for developing the talent and advancing possible performing careers of students who may choose this direction.”

“Dr. Herman Hudson groomed and mentored us, so I was lucky to come from having two women as mentors in my life during my undergraduate and graduate training, then a black male mentor at Indiana University. I had what I considered to be ideal career and opportunities for professional development because of my mentors. Dr. Hudson saw leadership potential in me and began grooming me,” she continued, referencing later academic roles as chair of AAADS, organizing the Afro-American Studies Majors Club and the Black Knowledge Bowl, initially sponsored by the Majors Club.

“Community has always been really important to me, having grown up in the black community and being totally supported by these communities wherever I lived. The black faculty and staff at IU were very much a part of the local African American community, which was uncommon or not at the same level at other universities. That relationship was facilitated by Dr. Joe Russell, who was an administrator and on the AAS faculty, and a major reason why I remained at IU for 42 years. Bloomington was my first experience of a rural-flavored Midwestern town with a small African American community. But my friendships in the local black community and my membership at Bethel A.M.E. Church made a difference for me, and I felt at home.”

“When we performed in the IU Auditorium, lines started forming around the building before shows and it was always packed. People came from Kentucky, Evansville, Gary, and Indianapolis, all around—parents, friends, and others who heard about the group. When we traveled, they’d say, ‘Wow, this is like professional entertainment for free,’ although paid for by the sponsoring university or organization. My greatest sense of accomplishment came from the impact the ensemble had on Bloomington’s African American community. Seeing these ensembles, seeing what these black undergraduate students could accomplish, really inspired a lot of people, especially the youth. I didn’t think about it at the time, but community members later made me aware of this influence.”

Born and raised in Orlando, Fla., Maultsby was a musical prodigy, taking private piano lessons with a renowned female teacher from the age of 5 and later, a retired Julliard piano professor who relocated to the nearby suburb of Winter Park, Fla. With skills honed from waking up daily at 5:30 a.m. to practice (waking up her supportive neighbors with pieces of classical music; they’d repay the favor by sponsoring Maultsby to return home for concerts, even after she left home), she would represent her all-black community as a soloist at numerous public events, then go on to perform with the high school choir and play the French horn with the award-winning marching and concert bands at Jones High School—not to mention co-founding a female vocal group that sung popular Motown songs and hits by other groups.

Influenced by their older brother, Maultsby and her twin brother went to Benedictine College in Kansas. At Benedictine, Maultsby continued two traditions—she formed a group that performed black popular music, and she had a female mentor, just like her first music teacher. Having developed her piano skills and learned music theory from her teachers, Maultsby initially wanted to be a concert pianist. But as her undergraduate years went on, she felt the pull of wanting to teach, a nod to her mother, a schoolteacher in an all-black elementary school in the segregated South.

“I was influenced by how my mother worked with students and her commitment to them. After school, she made home visits and worked with their parents. She was an activist, you might say, with great concern for her students, providing many opportunities for them to succeed as the community did for me as a musician,” she recounted. “During my undergraduate studies, I performed a lot and practiced between four and five hours every day, and that’s when I decided that wasn’t my social world, that I wanted to be more connected with the black community than I ever could be had I pursued a career as a concert pianist, even though my teachers said that I had a good deal of potential to be successful. I decided that I wanted to switch into an academic graduate program, and that’s why I ended up going to the University of Wisconsin in musicology.”

There, she completed her master’s degree in a year and a half—something unheard of—thanks to her excellent education at Benedictine. Fortunately, Maultsby found another mentor—the female director of Wisconsin’s new ethnomusicology department in the School of Music.

“That’s when everything began to come together intellectually for me,” Maultsby said. “I combined my interest in African American music in an official, intellectual way with my interests in African American studies and African studies, in addition to the my band there—Portia and the Soul Syndicate.”

While those interests were certainly evident in both the classes she taught and the Soul Revue—modeled after musical icon James Brown’s show—perhaps they are most crystallized in the Archives of African American Music and Culture, which Maultsby started in 1991. After she relinquished directorship of the Soul Revue, in conjunction with her research and publications on African American popular music and the music industry, Maultsby reached out to contacts she had met in the 1970s and ‘80s, and asked them to donate their collections to IU, rather than having to pay for-profit sellers for their use that they acquired at no cost.

“I grew up in the era of black empowerment and embraced the philosophy of self-sufficiency. I decided to find my own images, and establish some repository to make these and other materials available to scholars and others researching or programming topics on African American music and culture. That was the impetus for the archive. I attended several music industry conventions and talked to DJs and music industry executives, and they began providing photographs and other materials related to their careers,” she explained. “I collected in the areas of post-World War II black popular music and religious music, because no archive specialized in those traditions at that time. I acquired a lot of collections and continue to do so on behalf of the archives.

“I’m really proud of how far the archive has evolved over the past 26 years with the assistance of Brenda Nelson-Strauss (the archive’s head of collections), particularly in documenting the accomplishments of African Americans who would have remained unknown, like the founders and executives of black music divisions, heads of major labels, and others behind the scenes who contributed to the worldwide popularity of black music and the growth of the music industry as a multibillion dollar business. As I tell my potential donors, ‘This material is doing you no good in your closet or basement. Your story needs to be told.’”

Looking back at her tenure in Bloomington, Maultsby cites numerous people who were integral in helping her build the Soul Revue into the household name it is today, figures such as: coaches and assistant directors Lillian Dunlap and Kenneth Ware; James Mumford, who made a name for himself as the director of the African American Choral Ensemble; Iris Rosa, a dancer in the Soul Revue who became the first and only director of the African American Dance Company; Cheryl Keyes, Maultsby’s first Ph.D. student and now a full professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA; and administrators like the late Dr. Jimmy Ross, IU’s former director of IU’s Office of Scholarships and Financial Aid, retired chair of Afro-American Studies Dr. Joe Russell, retired Dean of Students and Jacobs School of Music Professor Dr. Michael Gordon, retired IU Chancellor Ken Gros-Lewis, current IU Provost Lauren Robel, and James Wimbush, IU’s vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion and dean of the University Graduate School.

While it’s tough for her to single out individual students, Maultsby remains delighted about how many of the performers under her and her assistants’ tutelage in the Soul Revue went on to successful careers in music—including current director Crystal Taliafero, the first female director since Maultsby herself—but also in other fields like business, real estate, medicine, education, and government. For example, she describes Judge Gonzalo Curiel, an original member, as “an excellent guitarist and conga player.”

“I’m very proud of all of them and I’m pleased by the way my career developed at Indiana University. There are markers of success and for me—they are how the students benefited from the programs and the time invested in them, and after they left, their careers flourished. We mentored our students, most of whom came to IU through the Groups Scholars Program. I couldn’t have done it by myself. I didn’t know Indiana University when I arrived, but with the assistance of others, I was able to identify undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff who believed in my vision and we worked hand in hand,” she said.

“I guess I’ve always been more of a builder. I’ve enjoyed being on the ground floor, assisting in the development of African American programs and organizations in their infancy. I did that with Afro-American Studies and the Soul Revue—I contributed to the vision, then became a leader. It was especially gratifying and exciting to witness an African American unit evolve into a competitive, ranked department, and have a high level of quality. The faculty was great. Everybody chipped in and pulled their weight, and we were all committed to its success, the success of our students, and to establishing a reputation as a leader in the field, which we did become.

“I was just as elated to have witnessed the formation of the African American Arts Institute in 1974. When I started, there was no AAAI. It’s just amazing how the ensemble began with no real administrative support staff—booking, travel arrangements, public relations, and so forth. For over four decades, AAAI has mushroomed, propelling the three ensembles to new heights. The institutionalization of black performing arts in African American units established by African Americans must be preserved, and the nearly 50-year legacy of exceptional achievement in this area at IU, celebrated.”

Portia Maultsby

Portia Maultsby’s work at IU made the university a leader in her field

Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration resources and social media channels