Scope and Content Note
The Sidney Robertson Cowell Collection, numbering more than 5,000 items, contains material from her work as a folk song collector and ethnographer; voluminous correspondence to her family, friends and colleagues--many of whom are prominent figures in 20th century American music--published and unpublished essays, reviews, and articles; biographical narratives; instructional materials from various stints as a music teacher, and an extensive subject file. The collection contains a great amount of information on Sidney Robertson Cowell’s husband, modernist composer Henry Cowell, including material pertaining to their marriage, writings by and about him, material dealing with his professional relationships with other notables in the music world, and documents concerning his musical legacy, which was carefully nurtured by Sidney Robertson Cowell.
A large part of the collection deals with two major aspects of Cowell’s life: her innovative and groundbreaking work as an ethnographer and folksong and ethnic music collector and recordist; as well as her role as husband Henry Cowell’s personal and professional partner and proprietor of his musical legacy. The extensive fieldwork materials she collected exemplify Sidney Robertson Cowell’s keen insights into the people and music she encountered and offer a behind-the-scenes look at the history and process of her work. The collection is also rich in material that details Cowell’s complex life with Henry Cowell, whom she married in 1941. There is material dealing with their personal lives as well as extensive material related to their writing and travelling collaborations and business and publishing ventures. After Henry Cowell’s death in 1965, Sidney took charge of his personal and professional reputation, which is reflected in correspondence and other material from the 1970s through the 1990s. The collection consists of nine series: Correspondence, Materials Relating to Fieldwork, Materials Relating to Henry Cowell, Biographical Material, Writings and Publications, Subject Files, Photographs, Teaching Materials, and Songs and Song Books.
The Correspondence series is divided into two subseries: Personal (non-family) and Professional Correspondence; and Family Correspondence. The first series covers a myriad of topics with a primary focus on professional matters. Correspondence with Suzanne Bloch, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lukas Foss, Alfred Frankenstein, Lou Harrison, Colin McPhee, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson concerns professional projects and interests, and offers personal news and viewpoints. Issues relating to Henry Cowell, such as music publishing, discographical entries, and biographical topics are the focus of extensive correspondence with H. Wiley Hitchcock, John Kirkpatrick, William Lichtenwanger, Bruce Saylor, and others. A large amount of the Lichtenwanger and Hitchcock correspondence deals with the catalog of Henry Cowell’s music, which was compiled by Lichtenwanger and published by Hitchcock’s Institute for the Study of American Music. Richard Franko Goldman, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Hugo Weisgall are also frequent correspondents. Sidney Robertson Cowell maintained relationships with many notables in the folk music field, including Bertrand Bronson, Sam Eskin, Charles, Peggy and Pete Seeger, and Margaret Valiant, all of whom are represented in this subseries.
The second subseries, Family Correspondence, contains correspondence with several family members, including Cowell’s parents Charles Hawkins and Mabel “Muz” Morrison Hawkins; husbands Henry Cowell and Kenneth Robertson; siblings Charles Ernest Hawkins, John “Bud” Hawkins, Anne Cotton, and Jeane Mibach; and Henry Cowell’s stepmother, Olive Cowell. Letters to her family, particularly to her mother, shed light on Cowell’s early life during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Extensive correspondence with her sister Anne captures Cowell’s thoughts and feelings on a host of personal and professional topics. In addition, these letters contain a great deal of information about relatives and ancestors from both the Hawkins and Morrison sides of her family.
The Materials Relating to Fieldwork series deals with Cowell’s major folksong and ethnographic music collecting and recording projects. Contained therein are not only finished reports, articles, and song lists derived from these activities, but also handwritten diaries, fieldnotes, letters and draft reports that reveal personal and procedural details about the projects. The series is divided into nine sections. The Resettlement Administration Field Trip to North Carolina with John Lomax section chronicles Cowell’s summer 1936 trip to Western North Carolina with John Lomax and Frank Brown. Cowell was hired in 1936 as Charles Seeger’s music assistant in the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration (RA). Although she had already done some field collecting, Seeger wanted her to become better acquainted with the recording equipment and to benefit from Lomax and Brown’s field experience. The material includes her fieldnotes, correspondence that provides context and background information on the trip, and the final report for the RA.
The Resettlement Administration (RA) section contains extensive fieldnotes, correspondence, memoranda and reports for the remaining field trips that Cowell made during her tenure at the RA, beginning around the autumn of 1936, through 1937, when the Resettlement Administration was reorganized under the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The RA was a New Deal program designed to provide economic aid to struggling rural, and to a lesser extent urban, families during the Great Depression. Cowell explained in a letter that the RA was using the native music of these rural communities as an agent of socialization and cooperation. She recorded extensively in the Ozarks, the Appalachians, and the Great Lakes Region during her time with the RA. Under the FSA, she served as regional representative and relief community manager in the Great Lakes Region for much of 1937. The material included in this subseries reveals Cowell’s sensitive and perceptive prose that offers insights into the communities in which she was living and working. The correspondence, memos, and reports to her RA colleagues, including Adrian Dornbush, Robert Van Hyning, and Grete Franke, illuminate behind-the-scenes problems, issues, and relationships within the RA on almost a weekly basis.
The California Folk Music Project (CFMP) section contains materials relating to Cowell’s most innovative and ambitious project. The CFMP was a New Deal collecting project that Cowell conceived of and managed for the Northern California Work Projects Administration. It was one of the earliest major attempts at documenting traditional and ethnic music in a specific region. Material in the section includes the final report for the project, in addition to notes and an outline for a book on folksong in California that she never completed. Extensive lists of recordings she made of traditional English-language, Western European, and Hispanic ethnic music contain date and place of recording, performer name, and annotations by Cowell.
The Carrie Grover from Gorham, Maine section contains a list of songs by Grover that Cowell recorded in 1941. The Appalachian Trip with Maud Karpeles section contains Cowell’s handwritten diary and notes from the 1950 trip to Appalachia during which she and Karpeles re-recorded performers originally recorded from 1916 to 1918 by English folksong collector Cecil Sharp. A list of the recordings also is included.
The Wolf River Songs and Ford-Walker Family section documents Cowell’s ongoing work with the music-making Ford-Walker family of Wisconsin. The material contains notes and drafts for the Folkways publication Wolf River Songs as well as annotated song sheets and lists of the Anglo-Irish ballads and lumber camp songs that she collected from the family.
The Songs from Cape Breton Island section contains handwritten drafts and annotated song sheets and transcriptions for her Folkways publication Songs from Cape Breton Island. Correspondence sheds light on preparations for the recording trip to Nova Scotia. The material also includes transcriptions of songs recorded by the North Shore Singers during that time and on other occasions.
The Songs of Aran section contains annotated song sheets and transcriptions from Cowell’s 1955 recording trip to Inishmore, the largest of Ireland’s Aran Islands. Cowell used this material in producing Songs of Aran for Folkways.
In the mid-1950s, Sidney Robertson Cowell and her husband Henry Cowell travelled extensively in Asia and the Middle East for both the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation to lecture, assess grant requests, and report on the status of classical and traditional music in various countries. Sidney Robertson Cowell took the opportunity to record many of the traditional musicians she encountered during these trips. The Travels in Asia and Middle East section contains notes, drafts, and finished reports written by Cowell detailing their activities and describing an area’s music and culture.
The Materials Relating to Henry Cowell series consists of a variety of materials, including correspondence, narratives, articles, and music holographs that are either by or about Henry Cowell. Henry Cowell permeates practically the entire Sidney Robertson Cowell Collection, but it was deemed necessary to create a separate series to accommodate the large amount of material related directly to him. It is divided into three sections. The Miscellaneous Material by and about Henry Cowell section contains narratives written by Sidney Robertson Cowell in later years about various aspects of Cowell’s life and work. In addition, there are essays and articles on music written by Henry Cowell, items relating to his discography, as well as commemorative articles on Cowell written for various occasions. This section also includes materials related to his two stepmothers. The “Henry by Sidney” section contains draft material for a biography of her husband that Sidney Robertson Cowell never completed. In her later years, she recorded onto tape personal and professional reminiscences about Henry Cowell and their life together which she planned to turn into a book. The transcriptions of those tapes are included here with Sidney Robertson Cowell’s notes and annotations. The Music by Henry Cowell section contains a small group of photocopies of musical holographs by Henry Cowell that are held in the Library of Congress.
Of particular interest in the Biographical Material series are narratives and essays written by Sidney Robertson Cowell in the 1970s that offer a revealing look back on her career and life with Henry Cowell. The series also contains a travel diary, notes, anecdotes, and random thoughts about her work, travels, and life in general. This series also includes clippings and articles about Cowell and reviews of her work, in addition to detailed family histories and documents relating to her ancestors from the Morrison-Tonnelle (mother’s side) and Hawkins (father’s side) families. One can also find her diploma, passports, and drawings in this series.
The Writings and Publications series offers a rich trove of Cowell’s writings, many in various stages of creation, from handwritten notes and annotated drafts to finished published products. Some items contain annotations that Robertson Cowell made long after the item was published. The series is divided into three sections. The Published Writings by Sidney Robertson Cowell section consists of her major publications as well as reviews, articles and obituaries of Percy Grainger and Charles Seeger. It also contains three items that were attributed to Henry Cowell, but were actually written by Sidney. Of particular interest in the Unpublished Writings by Sidney Robertson Cowell section is the part containing her Narratives on Collecting, which are revealing and lively accounts of past collecting and recording activities written in the 1980s and 1990s. The Drafts of Reviews, Papers, and Reports part contains drafts for many of the pieces found in the Published Writings section. Of particular interest are several drafts for an unfinished piece called “Three Generations of Folk Singers in the United States” and a draft for an article entitled “Music in Ghana” that was never published. The Miscellaneous part includes items such as project proposals, notes from courses, and fiction and poetry. The third section, Publications Written by Others, contains books, journals, and reports dealing primarily with folklore and traditional and world music. Explanatory narratives by Sidney Robertson Cowell accompany Midsummernight by Carl Wilhelmson and her Farsi primer.
The Subject Files series contains an assortment of materials related to people, organizations, and topics that figured prominently in Cowell’s personal and professional life. There is a significant amount of material (correspondence, articles, narratives and clippings) related to Charles Ives, about whom Sidney and Henry Cowell wrote a highly-respected book entitled Charles Ives and his Music. In addition, there is correspondence, accompanied by related notes, drafts, and essays, with individuals such as Bruce Saylor, Stephen Spackman, and James Ross, asking for advice, discussing writing projects, or consulting on issues related to Henry Cowell. There is background material related to music festivals and conferences in which Sidney Robertson Cowell took a major role. This series also includes material dealing with Cowell’s teaching career and some items relating to the Pan American Union where she worked in the early 1940s, including copies of Recordings of Latin American Songs and Dances: An Annotated Selected List of Popular and Folk Music by Gustavo Duran and edited by Sidney Robertson Cowell.
The Photographs series consists mostly of black and white photographs of Sidney Robertson Cowell; Henry Cowell; their families; and various friends, colleagues, and associates. Photography was Sidney Robertson Cowell’s avocation and she took many of the photographs found in this series. Folk and ethnic music performers that Cowell recorded throughout her career are the subjects of numerous photographs. Photographs of the offices and staff of the California Folk Music Project are included here as well as photographs of nature scenes, landscapes, abstracts, and animals taken by Sidney Robertson Cowell.
The Teaching Materials series contains notes, outlines, song sheets, reports, and narratives related to Cowell’s music classes for children and for a course on rhythm that she taught at the New School.
The Songs and Song Books series contains lists and books of songs that were collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell throughout her career. Of particular interest is a collection of folk songs with piano settings by Henry Cowell. This series also contains a collection of protest and propaganda songs from the 1930s and 1940s and a collection of songs sung by Cinderella Kinnaird, whom Cowell recorded.