Jeremy Tubbs: Building a Future in Music

Written by Eric Archer
Photographed by Hannah Gore

It’s nine-thirty in the morning when Jeremy Tubbs sticks his hand out to shake mine on the sidewalk in front of the Hamilton Performing Arts Center at the University of Memphis campus at Lambuth. In Jeremy’s other hand he balances a mug with the bag he has slung over his shoulder. “I think we probably have the building to ourselves for the interview,” Jeremy says to me as he reaches out and inserts his key into the front door of the building. He swings it open, letting me step inside. “Music students are more like eleven o’clock kind of folks.”

Just inside the entrance hall Jeremy pushes open a second door — his office. I step in after him as he circles behind a desk to set down his bag — a desk which, itself, is surrounded by walls adorned floor to ceiling with concert posters and plaques, records, and other memorabilia.

“I bet this took a minute to decorate,” I say as Jeremy steps past me back into the hall. 

“I call it my music library,” he jokes, pointing toward a shelf stuffed to its edges with vinyl records, before continuing deeper into the building. 

“So I went to South Side,” Jeremy tells me. We're now sitting on a pair of sofas inside Lambuth’s recording studio. Across from us are audio boards and studio monitors. Behind Jeremy I can see into a small vocal booth. The window behind me frames a second, larger booth, this one packed with drums and microphones, amplifiers, and instruments. 

“I graduated in ‘93,” he continues. “I came to Lambuth, um…” He stops to look at his phone. “Hold on one second,” he says, standing and walking back into the hallway, “I may need to open the door because some people want to get in.” I hear him continue talking as he walks back toward the door of the building, “Yeah, my office sometimes is a place where people come and do homework and stuff too.”

A moment passes before he reenters the room. He pauses in the recording studio. “I see stuff that has been moved around,” he says, pointing to the instruments and amplifiers. He sits back on the sofa across from me. “I love to come in and say like, ‘Hey, they've been recording.’” He settles back into the interview with a look of curiosity, as if he’s trying to imagine what creativity could have happened in this space since he left the building the night before. 

I’ve known Jeremy for no more than twenty minutes now — already I can tell there is more to this man than simply “music professor.” It seems that, to his students, Jeremy has full intention to be a friend and mentor as well as a professor. This thing he's built in this room — in this building — it’s seeming a lot more like a home than a degree program. 

“You were telling me you went to South Side,” I prompt. 

“Graduated in ‘93, came to Lambuth, and I came to Lambuth pre-med major.”

“Right,” I respond. We’re back in it.

“It's like, came here, you know, was going to pursue medicine, but also music minor.” He squares his hands from left to right, compartmentalizing the two interests — separating them. 

But Jeremy hated it. Every day from start to finish was enveloped with work, class, and studying. Over the span of 18 months music had rapidly become an afterthought.

“So, um, decided to change majors — told my dad. My dad was like, ‘Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.’” I laugh as he strings out the reaction. 

“‘Dad, I promise you,’” Jeremy continues. “‘I will still be a doctor.’ That's what I said.”

Jeremy’s bio is, itself, a text that is in no way lacking accolades — founding nonprofits, performing and music directing with platinum songwriters, studying at Oxford College in England and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, having a membership with the NARAS (that's the Grammys by the way), presenting papers at Yale. Among these many accolades also reads Ph.D. in Musicology. 

A promise kept.

Jeremy attended graduate school in Memphis, Tennessee. It was here that he would plug into the local music scene, attempting to experience all the city’s rich music history had to offer. 

“I think if I'd have gone to any other city, I don't know if I'd have been the same, you know? I fell in love with not only Memphis music, but this thing that's in the, you know, it's in the Mississippi River.”

It was there in that city of music that Jeremy made the decision to become a musicologist, something he almost felt destined to do. He loved all things music — Pop, Rock and Roll, Blues, The Beatles, The Stones, Clapton — and it’s that passion that landed him in an interview room with Kenneth Kreitner, professor of musicology at the University of Memphis. Kreitner was one of the world's foremost experts on Medieval and Renaissance music, but more importantly he was the man that could open the doors to the graduate program at Memphis.

Jeremy sat with Kreitner, and the break was that he liked what Jeremy was bringing to the table. “He affirmed me. He was like, ‘You — you've got this edge to you that's kind of neat.”

“That must have meant a lot to hear,” I respond. 

“In that meeting that day, after we talked for a little while, he basically said, ‘If you stay here through your master’s and doctorate both, and I'm your advisor the whole time, you won't have to pay for school.’”

“So did it work out that way?”

“Absolutely.”

2008 is the year that Jeremy graduated with his Ph.D.

“Within two weeks, Lambuth called me and said, ‘Hey, come home.’”

“Back to Jackson?”

“Back to Jackson,” he confirms. “And I was hired to start this program, basically.”

Jeremy and the other professors of the music department would be building a program from the ground up. In many ways it seemed that everything was falling into place, but in another way it would seem that this feeling was to be short-lived. In 2010 paychecks stopped arriving on time.

Rumors were flying around, feelings of uncertainty were spreading, and Lambuth was going bankrupt. The program Jeremy and his colleagues had been building ground to a halt. Jeremy tells me how he remembers packing away all the department's equipment into storage closets and barricading the doors. 

“They were afraid that looters were going to come on campus and start stealing stuff. They couldn't pay security. They couldn't pay people to watch at night, so people were coming on campus. Alumni were coming back and stealing bricks.” He raises his hand in confusion at the mayhem of it all. 

In light of the setback, Jeremy started playing more gigs and teaching music lessons. Jobs in academia are scarce during the summer. Given that most programs would not be hiring until fall of the following school year, Jeremy faced nearly a whole year in limbo. 

Jeremy turned to reliance on his music skills — gigs, lessons, and royalties — but even with his wife working, he had two young kids, and things were tight. Despite this uncertainty a glimmer of hope appeared on the horizon: Lambuth was to be bought by the University of Memphis. Unwilling to let opportunity slip by, Jeremy picked up the phone and placed a call to Memphis — the dean of the College of Fine Arts. 

“So I cold-called him, and his reaction was, ‘Let's meet, let's talk about this.’”

U of M already had a music department and ultimately saw no need to establish a second one, but like a lightbulb, Jeremy and the dean settled on a new idea. What if there was to be an extension of the music department, a program designed specifically to be studied in Jackson, Tennessee?

Jeremy started writing curriculum, and in 2023 the program was ready to be implemented. A Bachelor of Arts in Music and Entertainment — a program twelve years in the making.

“This is an art,” Jeremy tells me, sitting forward on the blue sofa across from mine. “So you get all types of people.” 

“Definitely,” I respond.

“It's like, well, we're a rainbow spectrum over here [in the music department] of different colors, shapes, sizes, mentals. It's a great thing. It's all diverse, and I believe inclusion and diversity bring out creativity, because I — I lived it. I've lived where I am a white heterosexual male that was really ingrained in the culture of African American Delta rock and roll blues.”

Jeremy speaks with a recognition that seems to carry gratitude for all that his life has exposed him to.

He  tells me the impact this diversity has made on his life, and the creativity that has flourished from welcoming it. What's more, he seems determined to offer his students the same opportunity to create great music in a space that values who they are.

“I want to make their lives better. I want…” He pauses. “If they have a passion and they understand the freedom that comes with that passion, then I want to nurture that and grow it to where they can go and do what they want to do in life.”

“It's  a passion, it's a freedom, and I want them to enjoy that, you know?”

“A lot of people come through the program, and if you poll — go out into the community and go to a gig, you'll see that somebody running sound or somebody on stage probably graduated from here. Every church on Sunday morning, you could walk up on stage and ask, ‘Where’d you go? Did you go to school?’ ‘Oh, I went to Memphis,’ or ‘I went to Lambuth.’”

Jeremy pauses for a moment, as if he's reflecting on the story he’s told me — the impact it has had on his life and the lives of his students. It is clear that here, in the Hamilton Performing Arts Center, Jeremy is doing much more than teaching music. He is shaping young creatives to have a true passion for their craft and for the world around them. He is making an impact not just on those students, not just on Jackson, but on every community those students choose to spread to throughout the world. 

“So, it's pretty — it's pretty amazing," Jeremy tells me. 

And it is.