Frances Densmore (1867–1957)

Frances Densmore was born in a converted schoolhouse in Red Wing, Minnesota, a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River. Her father was a civil engineer and owned a foundry. The Densmores had arrived in Red Wing from New York State when Minnesota was still on the frontier. During her childhood, Dakota Sioux people camped on an island opposite the town. Frances grew up in a musical household and later wrote about her sense of wonderment at hearing Native American music and dancing. In 1887, she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and returned home. She gave piano lessons and played the church organ before moving to Boston in 1889 to study with composer/musicians Carl Baerman and John Knowles Paine. Back home again, Frances began to give lectures about Native American music after a book by ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, A Study of Omaha Music (1893), rekindled her own interest in the subject. After several tentative starts, in 1905, she began a proper field study by visiting and studying music in a remote Chippewa village near the Canadian border. By 1907, Frances was learning, recording, and transcribing Native American music in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology to help preserve the traditional music before it disappeared. Over a 50-year career, she made 2,500 recordings with peoples of the Chippewa, Mandan, Hidatsa, Sioux, northern Pawnee of Oklahoma, Papago of Arizona, Winnebago and Menominee of Wisconsin, Pueblo of the southwest, Seminole of Florida, and other nations. These recordings are now held in the Library of Congress. Frances frequently contributed articles to the journal American Anthropologist throughout her career. She wrote The Indians and Their Music (1926), and 14 more book-length bulletins for the Smithsonian, each describing the musical practices and repertories of a different Native American group, between 1910 and 1957. These were reprinted as a series by DaCapo Press in 1972.