Barbara Wesley Baker (1948- ) graduated in 1969 from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) with a BA in music education. In 1974, she received her MA from Columbia University in New York City and her PhD from the University of Maryland in College Park in 1978. Baker retired in 2008 after teaching choir at the Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, for thirty years.Baker recalls growing up in segregated Kannapolis, North Carolina; participating in the 1961 civil rights protest in Fayetteville, North Carolina; and being taught piano and organ by North Carolina A&T State University Professor Charles Johnson Blue. She discusses being an organ major at UNCG; being taught by Professors Barbara Bair, Elizabeth Cowling, and Richard Cox; singing in the UNCG Choir; adjusting to campus life; and spending so much of her college life in the Brown Music Building. Baker recalls forming an informal singing group with Diana Barefoot, David Giddens, and Emmylou Harris that performed at the Four Faces Coffee House in Elliott University Center. She also talks about returning for her 40th UNCG Alumni Reunion and being disappointed on the emphasis placed on the 50th Reunion class with other classes more or less ignored. Since retiring in 2008, she has traveled all over the world as an invited music conductor, instructor, and speaker.
