It began when she was a child growing up in rural Danville, Virginia, on the Tennessee border, where her family was active both in a local church as well as musically. Initially she learned classical piano from her paternal grandmother and sang in the church choir. She thought about becoming a concert pianist.

But stage fright and anxiety made musical performance more difficult as a career choice – “I really didn’t have the stomach for it” — and in her college studies, both her academic and musical interests began to diversify.

Enrolling at Virginia State University, “I did not start college pursuing to be a musicologist and music historian,” she acknowledges.

Moreover, her musical background had been somewhat limited.

For one, she had grown up amid a conservative cultural atmosphere at home.

“I grew up thinking jazz was the devil’s music,” she says.

That changed once she was in school.

She started taking jazz piano and soon discovered a whole world she hadn’t known despite her early musical education.

“I loved classical music but didn’t love it as much as I thought I did.”

In learning jazz piano, she began to explore its origin and came across the name Mary Lou Williams, who would become the center of her academic study. A pianist, arranger and composer, Williams collaborated with myriad notable 20th-century performers, from Duke Ellington to Thelonious Monk to Miles Davis to Dizzy Gillespie. Dr. Kernodle’s longterm study of her eventually led to a book — “Soul and Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams.”

As the young student sought to shift away from performance as a goal, in her freshman year she settled on music education as her major.

She discovered in pursuit of that major that in doing observations at local schools, that Black music “was largely absent “ from the curriculum, even where the African-American population was significant.

“You couldn’t do blues, gospel … no one was really talking about that. It frustrated me as a young person and inspired me to do more.”

Ultimately she designed a major that focused on the Black experience in American music and to develop a way to impart that information via a class curriculum.

While initially she was prepared to talk about Mary Lou Williams to her audience at Chautauqua, Dr. Kernodle, given the week’s theme on transformation, instead decided to discuss the transformational power of music, which she will focus on at our Shabbat Shira service as well.

As Dr. Kernodle prepares, she is thinking biblically — about the story of the women’s celebration, led by Miriam, after the crossing of the Red Sea.

“What I hope to do is to align the scripture … with what we’re facing now … in hopes of invoking in people a spirit of perseverance, of resistance, so that our future can be what we envision it – less divisive, more inclusive.”