About Frances Densmore

Frances Densmore was one of the first white people to study Indigenous music, as well as one of the first ethnomusicologists ever. Over her lifetime, she recorded over 2,500 Indigenous songs on wax cylinders from over twenty-five different indigenous nations she visited in her travels, and she worked with the Smithsonian to create an archive for her works.

To reach this point, Densmore was guided by her sheer curiosity and grit throughout her childhood and early adulthood. Born in 1867 in Red Wing, Minnesota, she was often lulled to sleep by the sound of drums from the Dakota people nearby. Her mother refused to conform to spreading stereotypes of the Dakota of the time, and instead told Densmore that they were “interesting people with customs that [were] different” from theirs and that they “would not hurt her”.¹ Hearing these drums sparked an interest in studying Native music that would follow her all the way into adulthood.

Densmore’s subsequent education also showed how her childhood experiences fueled her eventual vocation. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio for three years, a college noted as an ardent supporter of educating both Black students and women in a time where including both those groups was often frowned upon. After returning home, she then started to teach music and lecture on Indigenous music, and specifically was inspired by Alice Fletcher’s 1893 book A Study on Omaha Music.¹ She began to attend conferences to meet Fletcher, as well as other scholars of Indigenous music, and specifically attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 to meet Fletcher, as well as the St. Louis World’s Fair. At these conferences, she would often lecture, but she began to establish connections within the realm of anthropology¹, and she eventually got in contact with the Smithsonian, who began to sponsor her travels in 1908.²

Once she received funding, her ethnographic work then began, fueled by an intense and often greedy desire to discover and keep record of music. She viewed her process very differently from most other anthropologists at the time: she viewed her work as a science, as a process to perfect in order to find the highest quality of singers and music. Her process would start with befriending singers that would be willing to record songs primarily. She also interviewed others for more general cultural information on the nation she was studying, which she would take ample notes on alongside what the singers told her. Then, she would record the song on a wax cylinder and later transcribe it to the best of her ability and to the limits of Western notation’s parameters. Unfortunately, her main goal within this process was to never allow the people recording to “think that [they are] in charge of the work”, and that a “strict hold must be kept on [them]”.³ In her books, lectures, and interviews, she also remarked on her perception of the quality of the singers doing the recordings for her and used her impressions of the experiences she had to make sweeping generalizations of the quality of music each nation had overall. This underlying self-centeredness became an issue with several nations she worked with. What was once just a curiosity became an overbearing and greedy demand, and she often crossed social boundaries of what a nation was comfortable with her studying and recording without any remorse. On several occasions, she was forbidden to record or study nations, yet still did so against the will of their leaders.³ The ethics of where her work was attached also carries issues, as she first traveled and worked with the Episcopal Church, which had an established presence amongst many reservations at this time. While the relationship was generally positive, this was another incident of the all-too-common white saviorism and colonial mindset of America’s, and evangelical Christianity’s, pasts.⁴ 

But while her stubbornness had its faults, it also opened the doors for her to establish her own archive with the Smithsonian and Library of Congress in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This proved difficult: the Bureau for American Ethnology, one of her most reliable financial supporters, had stopped funding her. This meant, to continue building her archive, she had to find alternative means of employment on several occasions. On top of this, she faced a significant amount of sexism as a woman in academia and research. Within her archive, she placed her wax cylinders, her scrapbooks, her journals, and many Indigenous-made possessions she had or was given to her from each nation, including instruments and cultural artifacts.⁵ She continued to work on her archive, and Densmore remained active as a scholar all the way up until her last days. She died on June 5th, 1957.⁶