Administrative Information
Provenance
Gift; Sidney Robertson Cowell; 1977-1994.
Accruals
No further accruals are expected.
Processing History
The Sidney Robertson Cowell Collection was processed and a finding aid made by Nancy Seeger in 2009. The finding aid was coded for EAD by Nancy Seeger in 2010.
Other Repositories
The other major repository of Sidney Robertson Cowell material is the Music Library of the University of California, Berkeley. The Inventory of the California Folk Music Project Records, 1938-1942 provides access to the records that were donated by the local Work Projects Administration in 1942. The collection includes administrative documents; English translations of articles on folk music; material on music in the California missions; lists of California songsters and hymnals; song texts with references to California; material on Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American folk songs; sketches, scale drawings, and tracings of folk instruments; sound tape reel copies of performances, and original glass sound discs. There are also 3x5 card file indexes of known recordings, photographs of performers, instruments, songsters, hymnals, and bibliographies.
The New York Public Library holds the Henry Cowell Papers and additional materials related to Sidney Robertson Cowell.
The Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections housed in the Smithsonian Institution's Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage contains duplicates of some of Cowell's Ireland recordings.
Related Material
Additional material relating to Sidney Robertson Cowell is in the following collections in the Library of Congress Music Division: Charles Seeger Collection, Nicolas Slonimsky Collection , Modern Music Archives , and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation Collection . Additional correspondence to and from Sidney Robertson Cowell is located in Music Division Old Correspondence and in a small collection that is entitled Sidney Robertson Cowell Correspondence which is cataloged separately under ML94.C69.
The American Folklife Center (AFC) of the Library of Congress holds significant primary source material by and relating to Sidney Robertson Cowell, primarily sound recordings accessioned into AFC’s Archive beginning in 1937. The Resettlement Administration Recordings Collection contains 165 field recordings of instrumentals and songs recorded in 1936 and 1937, in various states, by Cowell and others for the Resettlement Administration. It also includes her 1937 recordings of performances at the Fourth Annual National Folk Festival, in Chicago. The W.P.A. California Folk Music Project Collection in the AFC spans 1936 to 1991 and contains 239 discs that Cowell gave to the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library in 1939 and 1940. This collection surveys traditional music and folk song of many ethnic groups in northern California and also includes publicity materials, correspondence, song texts/transcriptions, notes on songs, interview forms, field reports, 170 photographic prints, and twenty-four drawings of instruments. A substantial portion of the collection, with interpretive essays, is available as "California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties" (see Online Content below). The recordings that Cowell made of Carrie Grover from Gorham, Maine also reside in the AFC. These recordings of folk songs, ballads and popular songs were recorded in Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1941.
The AFC has several additional collections related to Sidney Robertson Cowell. There are twelve tapes of folk music recorded in Ireland, Iran, Pakistan and Malaya in the mid-1950s accompanied by additional documentation. The Sidney Robertson Cowell Collection of Writings and Reminiscences contains her recollections about doing fieldwork and folksong collecting. It ranges from the 1950s to 1990 and includes additional biographical, music, and research material. Eight tapes of folksongs recorded by Maud Karpeles and Cowell in North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia in 1950 reside in the AFC along with accompanying documentation. AFC holds fourteen tapes of interviews and music recorded from 1952 to 1956 in Bangladesh, California, Canada, Iran, Ireland, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Nova Scotia, Pakistan, Wisconsin and Wyoming. This collection also includes correspondence, journals, logs, notes, postcards, transcriptions, and articles. In addition, there is one tape of Wisconsin fiddle tunes originally recorded on disc in 1937 and one disc containing songs sung by Ford-Walker family members recorded in Wisconsin in 1937.
Please contact the Folklife Reading Room, Library of Congress at [email protected] for more information about these Sidney Robertson Cowell collections.
Online Content
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress has digitized and made available a large portion of their W.P.A. California Folk Music Project Collection. California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/collafc.af000002) includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California.
The Traditional Music and Spoken Word Catalog from the American Folklife Center (http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/afccards/afccards-home.html) provides title and bibliographic information for many of Sidney Robertson Cowell’s ethnographic sound recordings accessioned in the Archive of American Folk Song up until about 1950.
The Wisconsin Folksong Collection, 1937-1946 (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/WiscFolkSong/#) contains recordings collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell during the summer of 1937 for the Resettlement Administration. These recordings were digitized from the original discs at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
Preferred Citation
Researchers wishing to cite this collection should include the following information: [item, date, container number], Sidney Robertson Cowell Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.