JTC 26: A Deeper South: Finding Meaning in Music, Art and Culture

The first time Kesler Smith took the mic at Rebel Radio, she hosted a show about Amy Winehouse. The blues singer – young, British, Jewish, with a teased-up beehive and an inexplicably soulful voice for a North Londoner – reflected something about the complexity of cultural identity that Smith intuitively understood.

Soon, the search for unexpected threads connecting people, places and cultures became the heart of her journey at the University of Mississippi.

Smith, of Oxford, graduates with honors in May, earning degrees in psychology and Southern studies. To Smith, both majors consider the same fundamental question: why do people become who they are?

Her coursework has ranged from cultural anthropology to a seminar on Bob Dylan, each sharpening her lens.

“There are few students I have enjoyed learning with as much as Kesler Smith,” said Eric Solomon, instructor of English and Southern studies. “Whether she’s writing about Alice Walker, Tennessee Williams or analyzing political campaigns, her intellectual and critical abilities have been inspiring to observe.

“What impressed me most is that Kesler is ultimately a kind human being who listens to her fellow students with care and collaboration.” 

A passion for music inspired Smith to become a disc jockey for Rebel Radio as a freshman, even though it meant overcoming nerves about being on the air. Her radio show, “Everything but the Kitchen Sink,” explored surprising cultural connections between different artists and genres.

The same curiosity followed her off the airwaves. Drink the River, a T -shirt company she co-founded with friends who are also Southerners, celebrates a South that many with deep roots in the region protectively understand – layered, complicated and harder to summarize than the outside world expects.

“Some people have a one-track mind about what the South is, who lives here and what we look like," she said. "Our goal is to celebrate that South in a way that might show a local perspective. I want Drink the River to shed a light on what we know and love.”

Smith also spent years as a student employee in the Office of Enrollment Management, giving tours to prospective students from around the country. She found it a gift to share her home and university with people encountering it for the first time.

Smith’s mother, Stacey Smith, is an assistant to the dean in the College of Liberal Arts. Her father, Whitman Smith, is a former director of admissions. Together, they represent just one chapter in a family relationship with the university that stretches back five generations.

Kesler Smith comes by her intellectual curiosity honestly. Her grandmother, also an Ole Miss alumna, read Carl Jung.

Her grandfather, Bev Smith, once played bridge with Peter, Paul and Mary while a student. The band had come to campus to perform a concert and needed a fourth. Bev Smith later served as the original curator of Rowan Oak.

“We are a family of writers,” Kesler Smith said. “I have some of their old letters, and some of them have made me cry. It’s a privilege to have letters that were written by family members I have never met.”

This summer, Smith will take her curiosity somewhere entirely new. Her first trip abroad will take her through Thailand and Taiwan, including a stop in Taipei, where she’ll visit an Ole Miss friend completing his capstone project for the Chinese Language Flagship Program.

It is, in her words, the world becoming her oyster.

Top: Kesler Smith, an Oxford native and fifth-generation Ole Miss graduate, earns degrees in psychology and Southern studies in May before heading abroad for her first international trip this summer. Smith co-founded Drink the River, a T-shirt company celebrating Southern cultural identity, and hosted a radio show on Rebel Radio throughout her time at Ole Miss. Photo by Srijita Chattopadhyay/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services