In Memoriam: Sherrell Virginia Martin, 1940-2020

Sherrell Martin, a former faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, died last month at the Floyd Medical Center in Rome, Georgia, after a brief illness. She was 80 years old.

After teaching at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1979 Dr. Martin joined the faculty at the Univerity of North Carolina at Wilmington. She taught music history, research in music, and piano and coordinated the bachelor’s degree in music program. She played a major role in the development of the university’s department of music in the 1980s and 1990s.

Dr. Martin served as the national musicology editor for American Music Teacher and was the national book review editor for the Journal of the Society for American Music. She taught at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington for nearly 40 years.

A native of Enterprise, Alabama, Dr. Martin earned a bachelor’s degree in piano at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1962. She held a master’s degree in music from the University of Alabama in 1967 and a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1974.