Jerrilyn McGregory

Professor, Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife University of Pennsylvania, MPS in Africana Studies Cornell University, MA in English Purdue University, BA in English Illinois Wesleyan University. She specializes in African American folklore and folklife, African Diaspora Studies, and onomastics (the study of proper names).

She is the author of Wiregrass Country, a regional folklife study of the South. To supplement the general regional study, Downhome Gospel: African American Spiritual Activism in Wiregrass Country is from University Press of Mississippi. It centers little known contemporary African American traditions such as the Twentieth of May (Emancipation Day); Sunday Morning Band (Burial societies), and sacred music from shape-note to contemporary gospel.

For many, December 26 is more than the day after Christmas. Boxing Day is one of the world’s most celebrated cultural holidays. As a legacy of British colonialism, Boxing Day is observed throughout Africa and parts of the African Diaspora; but, unlike Trinidadian Carnival and Mardi Gras, few know of Bermuda’s Gombey Dancers, Bahamian Junkanoo, Dangriga’s Jankunú and Charikanari, St. Croix’s Christmas Carnival Festival, and St. Kitts’s Sugar Mas.

Forthcoming, One Grand Noise: Boxing Day in the Anglicized Caribbean World delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the revelers who engage in celebratory sounds, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and dancing with abandon along thoroughfares usually deemed off-limits, especially in the wee morning hours, under the cloak of darkness.