Biographical Note
Frances Densmore (1867-1957) was an American ethnomusicologist known for her studies of Native American music and culture. During the early part of the twentieth century, she worked as a music teacher with Native Americans nationwide, while also learning, recording, and transcribing Native American music, and documenting its use in culture. She helped preserve Native American culture in a time when government policy was to encourage Native Americans to adopt Western customs. Densmore began recording music officially for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in 1907. In her fifty-plus years of studying and preserving American Indian music, she collected thousands of recordings. Many of the recordings she made on behalf of the BAE are now held in the Library of Congress. While her original recordings often were on wax cylinders, many of them have been reproduced using other media and are included in other archives. Densmore frequently was published in the journal American Anthropologist, contributing consistently throughout her career.