Song Catcher
Frances Densmore preserved the music of tribes across the West.
By: Jana Bommersbach 05/01/2007
The Dakota and Chippewa songs could have been lost forever if not for a pioneer Minnesota woman who decided these American sounds must not be silenced.
Thanks to Frances Densmore, early Indian music from throughout the country is preserved forever. She became one of America’s most important ethno-musicologists. She was a “song catcher.”
Sounds in the Night
Frances was just a girl growing up in Red Wing, Minnesota, when she first heard the traditional songs and drums of the Sioux Indians who lived nearby. She would remember the music went on well into the night. “In the twilight I listened to those sounds, when I ought to have been going to sleep,” she’d later report.
She had been born in the small, but fast-growing southeastern Minnesota town on May 21, 1867. Her family was prominent and prosperous, and Red Wing was becoming a thriving port for grain shipments. But it was still very much a frontier town. Tepees sat just outside of the town limits, and Frances grew up watching the Indians who came into town to shop or trade. She would remember she was always keenly curious about these “strange people.”
Her father Benjamin founded the Red Wing Iron Works. Her mother, the former Sarah Greenland, encouraged her daughter’s love of music and began her classical piano training early.
Frances was sent to Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio to study piano, organ and harmony. She graduated in 1887. Then she moved to Boston to study at Harvard with composers Carl Baermann and John Knowles Paine. While there, she became enthralled by the work of Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who had recorded the music of the Omaha Indians.
“The academic world was just beginning to recognize the importance of preserving the music of Indian cultures—many tribes, and their cultures, were fast disappearing because of the white man’s determination to ‘civilize’ them,” writes Bonnye E. Stuart in More than Petticoats: Remarkable Minnesota Women.
Frances returned home and taught piano for a couple years before she was drawn to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. One of the “technological marvels” she saw there was Thomas Edison’s new, lightweight sound recording machine. Frances immediately saw how valuable this could be in recording Indian music, but it would take her years before she would actually own one.
“Stirred by all the exciting things she had seen at the world’s fair, Frances headed back to Red Wing and began to formalize her plan to study and record Indian music,” Stuart reports.
Frances studied Fletcher’s techniques—the latter had recently published a book—and they began corresponding. Frances also threw herself into studying Indian culture, folklore and history, information she utilized while giving public lectures. As Stuart notes: “It was not long before she was traveling to North Dakota, Illinois and New York to deliver her lectures.” In the beginning, to illustrate the cadence and feel of Indian music, she struck two sticks together to simulate a drum beat; by 1903, she beat an authentic tom tom, covered in deerskin, with birch-bark rattles from the Chippewa. Her enriched lectures became popular. She also wrote an article titled “The Song and the Silence of the Red Man” for the Minneapolis Journal.
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