Jake Johnson is a writer, pianist, and vocal coach on faculty at the University of Oklahoma. His writing and teaching explore the interweaving of music, literature, art, and media in American life. At OU, Jake teaches undergraduate courses in music of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries and a wide range of topical seminars for graduate students. He is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
Jake is the author of Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America (2019) and Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (2021) and editor of the volume The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (2023). He has three new books forthcoming in 2025. The first, Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America, delves into film and television musicals of the 1960s to examine their place in networks of grieving in America, for America, and about America. His contribution to the Oxford Keynotes series is Harline and Washington’s When You Wish Upon a Star, a biography of the well-known American anthem that invites fresh questions about the boundaries of wishes and belief in this post-truth moment. Finally, and also with Oxford University Press, comes The Music Room: A Story of Art, Friendship, and Gathering in Betty Freeman’s Beverly Hills Home. This book, which New Yorker music critic Alex Ross calls “an indispensable volume,” inventively uses transcriptions of tape recordings made in Freeman’s home to give a never-before-seen account of how contemporary music in American and Europe developed and expanded in the home of a Beverly Hills music lover.
In addition to his musicological work, Jake is an active musical collaborator, having worked as a vocal coach, pianist, and musical director for artists and companies around the country. Many of his former students work prominently in theater, including starring roles on Broadway, in film and television, and on numerous regional and touring productions around the world.
Jake was born and raised in rural Oklahoma. He earned his BM in piano performance from Oklahoma City University, his MM in musicology from the University of Oklahoma, and his PhD in musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He makes a lovely life in Oklahoma City with his wife, BrieAnn, and their two daughters.
