NEW YORK, NY.- Richard Crawford, a longtime professor of musicology at the University of Michigan who helped legitimize and popularize the study of American music, died July 23 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was 89.

His wife, Penelope (Ball) Crawford, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”

While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)

Whereas Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.

So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.

His timing was fortuitous: Preparations for the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebration spurred a new public interest in reviving early American music, and Crawford helped build its scholarly infrastructure. He was a founding member of the Sonneck Society, later renamed the Society for American Music; wrote the first biography of Revolutionary-era composer William Billings, with David P. McKay, in 1975; and, through painstaking bibliographic work, excavated large swaths of repertory from the beginnings of American sacred music.

“Americanists set out, by turning our full attention to music in our own backyard, to prove the musicological worth of American studies,” he wrote in the journal American Music in 2005. The value was not in discovering an American Bach or expanding the classical canon, but instead shifting focus, as he once described it, “from Music with a capital M to music-making.” For Crawford, musical history was about process, not just product; performance, not just composition.

“They pointed not to beauty, not to excellence, not to the music that had survived, but to all the music whose existence in America could be documented,” he wrote of his generation of Americanists. “Only by reconstructing that totality could the life — the beating heart, we might say — of a forgotten or moribund tradition be glimpsed and a true image of historical ‘shape’ imagined.”

Thus, his magnum opus, the 2001 book “America’s Musical Life: A History,” presented not a parade of major composers and their masterworks but instead a rich musical tapestry, beginning with Native American songs and colonial psalms and continuing through African American spirituals, Civil War anthems, Tin Pan Alley and Philip Glass. With clear, matter-of-fact prose, Crawford placed economic and artistic developments in popular, folk and classical music side by side.

In a musicological universe that typically produced scholarly editions of Bach cantatas and Haydn quartets, Crawford’s unpretentious pluralism drove him to commission — as the founding editor of the important series Music of the United States of America — comprehensive volumes of the songs of Irving Berlin, as well as notable compositions by Ruth Crawford Seeger and Florence Price.

“Studying American music, a slightly eccentric pastime for a musicologist not so long ago, now seems more and more like a perfectly natural thing to do,” he said in a 1984 address to the American Musicological Society when he was stepping down as its president.

Richard Arthur Crawford was born May 12, 1935, in Detroit, to Arthur Richard Crawford, a foundry executive, and Mary Elizabeth (Forshar) Crawford, an artist. Early musical experiences included hearing his mother play piano and sing — he once recalled a memorable patriotic song she wrote during World War II — and he took up piano and then saxophone.

He started at Michigan as an engineering student, but when he took a role leading his dorm’s choir, his musical interests became more serious. Hitchcock spurred his engagement with the music of the United States. Crawford received all his degrees from Michigan: a bachelor’s in music education in 1958, a master’s in musicology in 1959 and a doctorate in musicology in 1965. He joined the Michigan faculty in 1961, remaining until his retirement in 2003.

Crawford was a generous, open-minded teacher, enthusiastically shepherding generations of scholars who worked on topics as varied as experimental music, Broadway musicals and recording technology.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, William; his daughters, Lynn Crawford Haddad, Amy Crawford and Anne Crawford; and eight grandchildren.

Just five days before Crawford’s death, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, an esteemed musicologist who succeeded him at Michigan and edited the Grove Dictionary of American Music, died of cardiac arrest.

“It’s a real blow to the field in terms of two people who were such powerful mentors,” Clague said. “The legacy that they leave in the world of American music is the power of generosity, the power of collaboration, the power of humanity.”

Crawford’s final book was “Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music” (2019). His fascination with Gershwin went back decades, to a time when his populist reputation often led to his dismissal in academic circles.

In 1979, Crawford wrote that if scholars were to take Gershwin’s music seriously, “it might signal that we are ready to explore American music-making — that is, the performance of music in the United States not just as an interesting sidelight but as an integral, perhaps even a central force in our musical life.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.