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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
