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Archives of Traditional Music Collection Highlights

/Archives of Traditional Music Collection Highlights


The Archives' holdings document the history of ethnographic sound recording, from wax cylinders made during museum expeditions in the 1890s to recent commercial releases on compact disc. The core of the collection consists of more than 3,000 field collections–unique and irreplaceable recordings collected by anthropologists, linguists, ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and others throughout the world. Extensive holdings of Native American, African, and Latin American music and spoken word, and several large collections of early jazz and blues 78s are just some of the strengths of our holdings. The rows below contain some samples and highlights. Browse the collection descriptions to learn more and hear or see sample recordings. Full IUCAT catalog records for these collections can be found by following the active links from the accession numbers on the highlight pages.

Hoagy Carmichael on a stage, playing a piano and singing, in the 1930s.

Hoagy Carmichael Collections. 1920s-1981. Holding over 3500 recordings, photographs, and personal effects from the life of popular songwriter, jazz musician, and actor Hoagy Carmichael, this is the largest collection of Hoagy Carmichael materials in the world.

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Sacred dance of the five lamas, China, AMNH image #336284

Berthold Laufer Collection. 1901-1902. Berthold Laufer's 400 phonograph cylinders from Beijing and Shanghai are the earliest made in China and include recordings of Bejing opera, folk songs, tea house songs, popular drama, and more—recordings with great scholarly value.

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Two totem poles on Cormorant Island, 1914.

Boas and Herzog Recordings of Dan Cranmer. 1938. This collection by Franz Boas and George Herzog has songs sung by Kwakwaka'wakw Chief Dan Cranmer who worked with Boas on the creation of a Kwak'wala dictionary. Added to National Recording Registry for 2013.

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Lawrence Gellert makes a disc recording.

Lawrence Gellert. 1920-1940. African American songs of protest from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. At a time when segregation was embedded in the law and the culture, Gellert documented more than 600 songs by African Americans.

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A boy stands in a jungle clearing holding a small musical instrument.

Alan and Barbara Merriam. 1951-1952. Belgian Congo. Alan Merriam (1923-1980) and his wife Barbara recorded a large number of ethnic groups in eastern, west central, and Ituri Forest areas of the Congo (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) and Ruanda-Urundi.

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Sabino Canyon, Arizona

Doriane Woolley McCullough. 1938. Akimel O'odham, Sacaton, Arizona. Woolley recorded the major Akimel O'odham song series at the Gila River Indian Reservation and produced over 800 pages of song texts, translations, and music transcriptions.

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Herbert Halpert writes down a song, 1946.

Herbert Halpert. 1939. WPA recordings in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, southeastern Pennsylvania, and New York. In 1939, folklorist Herbert Halpert (1911-2000) traveled through the mid-Atlantic states recording individuals singing Anglo-American ballads, sea shanties, and historical, work, bawdy, and game songs.

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Badi musicians and dancers in Nepal

Annapurna Bech Memorial Collection, Nepal. 1965-1968. Terence Bech recorded over 260 hours of performances and life histories on more than 400 tapes, transcriptions, photographs, and field notes. The collection documents a wide variety of ethnic groups including Tibetans in exile.

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Henry Robert Antoine, head drummer in the Rada community, Trinidad

Andrew Carr Collections. 1953-1954. These recordings of the Rada community were made in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, by Andrew Thomas Carr, a native of Trinidad and a champion of its culture. The Rada are an ethnic group linked linguistically to the Ewe-Fon of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin).

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Head and shoulders view of an eldery Lakota man.

George Herzog Recordings of Yanktonai-Dakota Indians, 1928. George Herzog (1901-1983) made this collection of 195 wax cylinder recordings in 1928 at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in Fort Yates, North Dakota. Added to the National Recording Registry for 2017, the collection consists of recordings sung by seven men.

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Four women and a little boy stand in front of a dwelling and look ing at the camera.

Lorenzo Dow Turner Collections. 1932-1964. Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972) was an African American linguist who became known as the father of Gullah studies. The audio recordings he collected in the US, Brazil, West Africa, and the Caribbean helped build a foundation for scholarship on the African diaspora.

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A young man stands with his arm around an older woman in rolling countryside.

Henry Glassie Northern Ireland Collection. 1972 and 1977. Glassie's recordings of interviews with and performances by the residents of County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland are part of the research that became several books, most notably, Passing the Time in Ballymenone.

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Genya Sandler sits on a bed and gestures as she talks.

The AHEYM Collection. 2000-2009. The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM) includes Yiddish language interviews with approximately 350 people, most of whom were born between the 1900s and the 1930s, conducted in Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia.

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Four men known as a conjunto de caña de millo hold their drums in an area of barren ground and lush vegetation.

George List Colombia Collections. 1960s. George List (1911-2008) created this diverse set of recordings that document music and narrative practices in villages along the Caribbean Coast of Colombia in the 1960s. Many of the instruments, songs and musical activities List documented are no longer practiced.

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Musicians perform on stage for WOWO Radio's Hoosier Hop barn dance show.

Donald Lake Collection. 1940s. These 69 original lacquer disc recordings were made by the Blackhawk Valley Boys. The Western Swing band performed on the syndicated Hoosier Hop radio barn dance broadcast on WOWO Radio in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, at a time when barn dance radio programs and "hillbilly" music were popular.

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Haitian musicians squat on the ground and play bamboo stampers.

Harold Courlander Haitian Collections. 1939-1983. Harold Courlander made more than twenty trips to Haiti and produced numerous books and articles on the subject of Haitian music and oral literature. The Archives of Traditional Music holds four collections of his research in Haiti.

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Seven native Navajo ride on horseback with a dog against a background of canyon cliffs.

Edward Sheriff Curtis Collection. 1907-1913. Well-known today for his stunning portraits of Native Americans, Curtis also recorded songs from many indigenous peoples in the western United States and Canada as he worked on his magnum opus, Indians of North America.

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A group of Ainu people stand in native clothes facing the camera.

Kyojiro Kondo Collection of Ainu Music. c.1957. A collection of narratives and songs of the Ainu people documented by Kyojiro Kondo in an early effort to preserve this traditional culture. The Ainu of Hoikkaido have been increasingly assimilated by the predominant Japanese culture.

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Helen H. Roberts (inset) and a group of Jamaican musicians

Helen Roberts and Martha Beckwith Collections. 1921. After studying anthropology with Franz Boas, Roberts and Beckwith went on to dedicate their careers to ethnography. Their joint research in Jamaica resulted in collections of Anansi Story Songs and other songs in English and Creole.

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A large group of Yakuts stand in a circle and dance at a festival.

Jesup North Expedition. 1897-1902. This major anthropological expedition, led by Franz Boas of the American Museum of Natural History, collected information about indigineous peoples on both sides of the North Pacific region ‒ the Siberian Coast and the North American Pacific Northwest.

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Four koras lean against a clay wall.

Charles S. Bird Collections. 1961-1990. A professor of linguistics at Indiana University Bird researched and worked with master musicians to promote wider understanding of Malian and West African music and expressive culture. His numerous recordings also include Malian performances and lectures at IU.

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