Here I sit this afternoon, in a Teaching American History workshop, listening to the history of American music with ROAM (the Roots of American Music): folk, blues, country, and Rock-n-Roll.  Amazing! I realized as I was listening to this, something about my own coming of age. I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis and went to parochial schools in the 1970s and early 1980s. Musically, my teenage angst found its expression in early punk, Reggae, and ska, which I couldn’t quite understand but loved: Clash, Sex Pistols, Marley, and the English Beat. As I made decisions about College, I couldn’t get my mind off of the University of Chicago for so many reasons, not the least of which, I now recall, had something to do with experiencing a big city. My search for diverse experiences was realized in that first week when I spent orientation week engaged in a series of activities that really energized me in ways that come back to me now as I listen to ROAM. I went, over the course of a week, to an ethnic dinner with a belly-dancer on the deep south side of Chicago (near to Gary, Indiana), a blues bar (the Checkerboard), a concert by Sonny Okosun, a Nigerian musician whose anti-apartheid music appealed on college campuses of the 1980s, on an architectural tour of the city and its lakefront, shopping downtown and riding the elevated trains, and, of course, participating in the book discussions and sherry hours that are/were so much a part of UChicago’s life of the mind. As I listen to ROAM today, I realize just how much power that popular culture had in defining my intellectual life–as much as the other more formal educational experiences.