Densmore was born on May 21, 1867, in Red Wing, Minnesota.[1][2] As a child Densmore developed an appreciation of music by listening to the nearby Dakota Indians. She studied music at Oberlin College for three years.[3] During the early part of the twentieth century, she worked as a music teacher with Native Americans nationwide, while also learning, recording, and transcribing their music, and documenting its use in their culture.[1] She helped preserve their culture in a time when government policy was to encourage Native Americans to adopt Western customs.
Densmore began recording music officially for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in 1907. In her fifty-plus years of studying and preserving American Indian music, she collected thousands of recordings.[4] Many of the recordings she made on behalf of the BAE now are held in the Library of Congress. While her original recordings often were on wax cylinders, many of them have been reproduced using other media and are included in other archives. The recordings may be accessed by researchers as well as Tribal delegations.
She wrote The Indians and Their Music in 1926.[9] Between 1910 and 1957, she published fourteen book-length bulletins for the Smithsonian, each describing the musical practices and repertories of a different Native American group. These were reprinted as a series by DaCapo Press in 1972. Raymond DeMallie describes Densmore's Teton Sioux Music and Culture as "one of the most significant ethnographic works ever published on the Sioux."[10]
Densmore died on June 5, 1957, at a hospital in Red Wing. She was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.[2]
Awards
Oberlin College awarded Densmore an honorary M.A. degree in 1924. Macalester College followed suit in 1950, awarding her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. In 1954, the Minnesota Historical Society recognized her with its first-ever "Citation for Distinguished Service in the Field of Minnesota History."[12][13]
The National Association for American Composers and Conductors recognized Densmore in its 1940–1941 awards for her musicological work.[14]
^"Frances Densmore". Smithsonian Institution Archives. Archived from the original on May 21, 2013. Retrieved September 11, 2012.
^Kennedy, Stetson (1989k). Palmetto Country. Tallahassee, Florida: Florida A&M University Press. p. 354. ISBN0-8130-0959-6.
^Levine, Victoria; Lindsay, Levine; Dylan, Robinson (2019). Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. p. 21.
^Piehl, Cindy; Jodi Ratzlaff. "Frances Densmore". Minnesota State University, Mankato. Archived from the original on October 18, 2007. Retrieved September 3, 2007.
^DeMallie, Back cover, Teton Sioux Music and Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).
^Rice, Julian (1994). "A Ventriloquy of Anthros: Densmore, Dorsey, Lame Deer, and Erdoes". American Indian Quarterly. 18 (2): 169–196. doi:10.2307/1185245. JSTOR1185245.
