Author Stephen Koch and illustrator Katherine Strause will discuss their new book, “From Almeda To Zilphia: Arkansas Women Who Transformed American Popular Song,” at University of the Ozarks on Wednesday, Oct. 7, as part of the University’s 2026-27 Walton Arts & Ideas Series.
The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Rogers Conference Center. There is no cost for admission and the public is invited to attend. There will be books available for purchase.
The book profiles artists who are connected to Arkansas and who have influenced music around the world in ways still being discovered. It has received both the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence for Best Research in Recorded Popular Music and the Arkansas State Library’s Arkansiana Award.
Despite their collective cultural impact, these women’s stories have too often been overlooked, forgotten, or never told, according to Koch.
Part history, part art, and part music, the book features a wide cross-section of inspirational creatives across the decades. With surprises like Maya Angelou’s side career as a calypso singer and Carrie Cash, who recognized that her son, Johnny, had “the gift,” “From Almeda To Zilphia” covers a wide variety of musical styles, including Gospel-Rosetta Tharpe, Opera-Marjorie Lawrence, Blues-Sippie Wallace, Folk Ballads-Almeda Riddle, Dance-Pop-Beth Ditto, Classical-Florence Price, and Country-K.T. Oslin.
One of the women featured in the book is Zilphia (Johnson) Horton, a 1931 music graduate of U of O (then The College of the Ozarks) who went on to become an influential educator, folklorist, musician and social justice activist in Tennessee in the 1940s and 50s. The Paris, Ark.-native promoted the use of folksongs and hymns in the labor and civil rights movements, notably, “We Shall Overcome,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
Working from often hard-to-find historic photographs, vivid portraits by renowned artist Strause of the women profiled make plain the strength and artistry of these cultural pioneers.
With a thoughtful forward by professor Dr. Cherisse Jones-Branch and a heart-wrenching afterword by acclaimed country music songwriter Erin Enderlin, “From Almeda To Zilphia” is written by musician and award-winning journalist Koch, writer and host of the syndicated public radio program Arkansongs.
Koch has been involved in recognition and preservation efforts of forgotten musical greats, especially Louis Jordan, the ground-breaking jazz/R&B pioneer, authoring the biography “Louis Jordan: Son of Arkansas, Father of R&B,” a Jordan musical, “Jump!,” a Jordan documentary film, “Is You Is,” and helping create a Louis Jordan Memorial Highway near Jordan’s native Brinkley, which is also home to a bust of Jordan, funded by Koch’s annual Louis Jordan Tribute concerts. He consults with communities to help them promote their cultural legacies. He wrote and narrated the documentary film “Music In Arkansas Origins: 200 B.C.-1941 A.D.,” airing on PBS.
Strause is a painter based in Little Rock, Ark., whose work explores themes of memory, resilience, identity, and the human presence through richly layered oil paintings. Her figurative work examines the emotional and psychological landscape of contemporary life, drawing on personal experience, history, and the expressive possibilities of paint. Working exclusively in oil, she builds luminous surfaces that balance observation with abstraction, inviting viewers to consider the quiet strength and complexity of her subjects. Strause has exhibited her work throughout the South and Midwest in museums, universities, and galleries.