He recently won the Irving Lowens Article Award for his research on Sam Cooke published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Burford is a music historian with expertise in nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music and twentieth-century African American popular music. His current research focuses on the circulation and reception of black gospel singing within U.S. popular culture during the 1950s and early 1960s. He received a BA in music from the University of California at Santa Barbara and MA and PhD degrees in historical musicology from Columbia University.