Frances Theresa Densmore Papers

Ethnomusicologist Frances Theresa Densmore was born on May 21, 1867 in Red Wing, Minnesota to Benjamin and Sarah (Greenland) Densmore. She later cited her childhood experiences listening to the music of the Dakota people as an important influence. From 1884 to 1887, Frances studied at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. After leaving Oberlin, she taught piano in St. Paul, Minnesota, until 1889, when she moved to Boston for private lessons with composers Carl Baerman and John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) at Harvard University. During the year 1898, she studied with Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) in Chicago. In 1924, Oberlin College awarded Densmore the honorary M.A. degree, and in 1950, Macalester College in St. Paul conferred upon her the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. In 1954, she was awarded a citation for distinguished service by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Densmore's professional interest in the music of indigenous peoples dated from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair at which she met with Alice Cunningham Fletcher. Fletcher later became her mentor. In 1905, Densmore made her first visit to the Minnesota tribes, traveling to a Chippewa village near the Canadian border and publishing her observations in the American Anthropologist (April-June 1907). In 1907, she began to record American Indian music and successfully petitioned the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology for financial assistance. So began her fifty-year association with the Bureau, which paid her a yearly stipend and gave her the title of Collaborator.

During her years of work on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution, Densmore traveled throughout the country to indigenous nations and homelands, where she recorded on wax cylinders nearly 2,500 songs of the Sioux, Yuma, Cocopa, Yaqui, Pawnee, Northern Ute, and other tribes. In all, she recorded the songs of almost thirty tribes. The entire collection was eventually transferred from wax cylinders to long-playing discs and initially named the "Smithsonian-Densmore Collection of Indian Song Recordings." In addition to recordings, Densmore also collected hundreds of musical instruments, which are housed in the Smithsonian's museums.

Densmore's numerous monographs on indigenous music were issued in a series of publications of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. The best known of these are Chippewa Music (1910), Chippewa Music--II (1913), and Teton Sioux Music (1918). Her other publications include The American Indians and Their Music (New York: The Woman's Press, 1936) and Cheyenne and Arapaho Music (Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1936). She often struggled to publish her work, something she attributed to the lack of appreciation for the study of music more generally.

Frances Densmore died on June 5, 1957 at the age of 90 in Red Wing, Minnesota.

Sources Consulted

Notable American Women: the Modern Period. Cambridge: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.

Student File of Frances Densmore (RG 28).

Michelle Wick Patterson, "She Alwawsys Said, 'I Heard an Indian Drum,'" In Travels with Frances Densmore, Her Life, Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

"About Frances Densmore," The Musical Geography Project, Accessed December 10, 2024, https://musicalgeography.org/about-frances-densmore/.

"Frances Densmore," Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accessed December 10, 2024, https://siarchives.si.edu/oldsite/research/sciservwomendensmore.html?msc=mediariver.

Note written by Valerie S. Komor; updates and additional citations by Emily Rebmann.