Ethnomusicology

2700 pieces of sheet music published in California between 1852 and 1900, with related materials such as programs, advertisements, and photographs. Search or browse the collection by composer, genre, topic, cultural group, or by the subject of the cover illustration.

This collection features the original Fewkes/Passamaquoddy phonograph recordings and associated fieldnotes, primary materials, and related journal articles. Part of the Passamaquoddy Peoples' Knowledge Portal, Kulasihkulpon yut Peskotomuhkati-pomawsuwinuwok Etoli-kisokehkimsultimok.

Materials related to the career of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax: streaming sound and video recordings, radio programs, photographs, interviews and lectures, and field recording session information. The Lomax Geo-Archive maps digitized field recordings and session information onto geographic locations.

Alan Lomax spent his life in transit, documenting folk music from across the United States, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, North Africa, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Caribbean. Here you can download select liner notes, press releases and photos, as well as view select videos and listen to select streaming audio. There are also items available for purchase.

This presentation contains more than 500,000 pages of Alan Lomax’s personal papers and office files from his time at the Library of Congress (1932-1942) and from his post-Library career through the 1990s. Featured are Lomax’s writing projects such as Land Where the Blues Began (1993), the unpublished Big Ballad Book, as well as documentation of his extensive work in radio for the CBS and BBC networks. Also included are thousands of pages of field notes and correspondence associated with his field projects beginning in the 1930s.

The collection of 40,000 hours contains thousands of high quality programs that have had national impact. The vast majority of this initial American Archive content, however, consists of regional and local programs that document American communities during the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.

The AMRF is dedicated to the promotion, documentation, and preservation of American Music, particularly blues, ragtime, boogie woogie, jazz, and rhythm and blues, primarily by capturing artists on video, both in performance and in extensive interviews. The ultimate goal is to document and preserve American cultural and musical history so that future generations will not forget.

An eclectic collection of music from Americans of diverse origins and all walks of life, from America’s past and present. The songs are by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. They touch topics as varied as Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more. And the range of genres includes country, folk, bluegrass, Western, old time, American Indian, blues, gospel, shape note singing, doo-wop, Motown, R&B, soul, funk, and others.

The Arhoolie Foundation archive is comprised of various rare collections. Most significant is the massive body of records, books, photos, papers, posters, and other artifacts of roots and regional musics amassed by Chris Strachwitz

Listen to approximately 40,000 recordings of music from the border regions of Mexico and the United States. These performances document many types of popular lyric songs, including the first recordings of corridos (narrative ballads on topics of the day), canciones, boleros, rancheras, and sones, including the first recordings of norteno and conjunto music.

Provides online access to digital audio files of cylinders in the Syracuse University Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive. Belfer's cylinder collection includes over 22,000 cylinders, 12,000 of which are unique titles.

The purpose of the Black Gospel Music Preservation Program (BGMPP) is to identify, acquire, preserve, record and catalogue the most at-risk music from the black gospel music tradition. This collection will primarily contain 78s, 45s, LPs, and the various tape formats issued in the United States and abroad between the 1940s and the 1980s. Additionally, any ephemera that may be of use to scholars – including PR photos and press packets, taped interviews, informal photographs, tour books and programs, newspaper and magazine clippings, and sheet music – will also be acquired as it becomes available. The ultimate goal is to have a copy of every song released by every black gospel artist or group during the target time period.

The WPA California Folk Music Project is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. The collection comprises 35 hours of folk music recorded in twelve languages representing numerous ethnic groups and 185 musicians.

A catalog and online archive of the indigenous languages of California, western North America, and the Americas. A project of The Berkeley Language Center (BLC) and the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, the UC Berkeley materials are the largest indigenous language archive at a U.S. university. Digital content includes rare audio recordings and written documentation.

The collection consists of approximately 344 sound recordings, 14,141 photographs, 269 folders of manuscript materials, 2 videorecordings, publications, ephemera, administrative files, and field notes produced and collected during the 1977 Chicago Ethnic Arts Project field survey from 1976-1981.

Crescent City Sounds connects the residents of New Orleans with the music of the city with a curated, commercial-free streaming library made up of local artists. Crescent City Sounds’ main goal is to create partnerships in the community. We seek to create relationships between artists, the cultural institutions of New Orleans, and the listening public. Our aim is to nurture the creative community from the culture bearers of today or those carrying the torch into the future.

Cross-Cultural Dance Resources Collections collects, preserves, and provides access to an aggregation of research materials to support the interdisciplinary study of dance as a human universal and to enrich understanding of dance in all its societal functions and cultural contexts.

D.K. Wilgus and Wayland D. Hand established Folklore Studies at UCLA, and together founded the Folklore and Mythology Program in 1965. Wilgus came to UCLA in 1963, where he was professor of English and Music until his death in 1989. Wilgus held numerous offices in national and state folklore societies: Editor of Western Folklore for the California Folklore Society; President of the California Folklore Society; Vice-President and President of the American Folklore Society. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Wilgus produced and directed UCLA’s legendary folk music festivals. Wilgus was a folksong and ballad scholar, indefatigable fieldworker, and renowned authority on Anglo-American folksong, African American records, and Appalachian music. He was a pioneer in the teaching of Anglo-American folksong as a rigorous academic subject, in identifying the blues ballad as a legitimate form of narrative song, and in developing the “narrative theme” approach to ballad classification. At the time of his death, Wilgus’ scholarly biography consisted of more than 250 items, including three books and innumerable essays on folk music. During his tenure at UCLA, he demonstrated his commitment to both the academic study and the performance of folk music and built an archive of folksong and folk music of over 8,000 commercial recordings and 3,000 field recordings. A selection of field recordings by Wilgus and his students are included in this collection.

The Digital Library of Appalachia (DLA) provides online access to archival and historical materials related to the culture of the southern and central Appalachian region. The contents of the DLA are drawn from special collections of Appalachian College Association member libraries.

Includes information on more than 143,000 master recordings (matrixes) made by Victor, Columbia, Okeh, and Berliner. Included are:
* Victor Talking Machine Company recordings made in the United States and in Central and South America of up to 1935, releases derived from masters recorded in Europe by the Gramophone Company, and trial recordings of new artists and sessions from which no discs were issued.
* Columbia Records 10" domestic masters recorded between 1901 and 1934
* Columbia Records 12" domestic masters recorded between 1906 and 1931
* Berliner Gramophone Co. domestic recordings from 1892 to 1900
* OKeh masters recorded between 1918 and 1926

Provides high-quality facsimiles of the ballads as well as facsimile transcriptions (which preserve the ballad’s original ornament while transcribing its unfamiliar typeface into easily readable modern print). In addition, EBBA supplies recordings of the ballads whenever a tune is extant, extensive cataloging of the ballads, including cataloging of their illustrations or woodcut impressions, background essays on the various ballad collections included in EBBA and on ballad culture generally as well as other helpful ballad resources.

A multi-format ethnographic field collection of traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia and recorded by folklorist Alan Jabbour in 1966-67, when Reed was over eighty years old. Many of the tunes have passed back into circulation during the fiddling revival of the later twentieth century.

The site showcases the AHRC-funded Beyond Text project Growing into Music, which looks at children learning and making music in six cultures of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, mostly through the medium of video.

The site showcases the AHRC-funded Beyond Text project Growing into Music, which looks at children learning and making music in six cultures of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, mostly through the medium of video.

A multimedia website leading to archival descriptions and content listings for the Helen Creighton fonds. Includes a special Virtual Exhibit with over 50 photographs; three of Creighton's personal photo albums, fully digitized; several sound clips; and a selection of online documents, including first-hand accounts of the supernatural.

A multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. In 1940, Juan Bautista Rael of Stanford University, a native of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, used disc recording equipment supplied by the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center) to document alabados (hymns), folk drama, wedding songs, and dance tunes.

Contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by their users.

A digital resource for the study of the 1934 John and Alan Lomax trip to lower Louisiana, where they recorded a diverse array of songs in English and in Louisiana French.

The John Edwards Memorial Foundation, which operated 1962-1983, was located at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The foundation's goal was to promote the study of twentieth-century American folk music. In 1983, the Foundation was dissolved, and a successor organization, the John Edwards Memorial Forum, was established. Correspondence, chiefly 1964-1982, dealing with everyday business of the John Edwards Memorial Forum and its predecessor organization, the John Edwards Memorial Foundation. Letters include subscription, record, reprint, and pamphlet purchase requests, as well as requests for biographical, historical, and discographical information. Files relating to record reissues, reprints, and pamphlets contain written descriptions of much of the material involved. Records of various federal grants are fairly comprehensive, containing proposal drafts, correspondence, and financial figures. There is little material about the "JEMF Quarterly" or the "JEMF Newsletter." The photographic materials depict musicians from a variety of musical traditions circa 1930s-1980s and were originally used to accompany educational materials generated by the JEMF in the 1970s. Miscellaneous items cover a wide range of subjects, from testimonials praising the Foundation to checkbook registries, 1963-1979.

J. P. Harrington carried out his research in much of North America during the first half of the 20th century. The majority of the collection represents ethnological and linguistic fieldwork in California and with Native people in the Southwest, Great Plains, and Alaska. J. P. Harrington’s research also extended into southern Mexico, across much of Canada, and along the eastern coast of the United States. The collection also includes close to one million pages of notes filling over 1,000 archival boxes, plus over 200 sound recordings, some 3,500 photographs, and thousands of botanical and other natural specimens. You can access the audio recordings through the Smithsonian's Information Research Systems (SIRIS).

The exhibition features music and song recordings from First Nations, Inuit and Métis artists, and from the recording labels that produced their work. Visitors to this site can listen to a selection of clips and tracks of traditional and contemporary music and song. Essays are also available about the origins, changes and adaptations of the Aboriginal music scene in Canada.

A multimedia website devoted to the early days of Canadian recorded sound, providing an overview of the 78-rpm era in Canada. The Virtual Gramophone database contains information and images for more than 15,000 78-rpm and cylinder recordings released in Canada, as well as foreign recordings featuring Canadian artists and/or compositions.

American Memory provides free and open access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

Music recorded in Newfoundland and Cape Breton by MacEdward Leach between 1949-1951. The Cape Breton Gaelic songs recorded by Leach, include milling songs, psalm precenting, homeland songs, love songs, and locally composed songs, and war songs. In Newfoundland, Leach recorded comic songs, ballads, cumulative or enumerative songs, and shanties. He also collected a number of instrumental dance tunes.

Dedicated to the study, preservation, and the promotion of musical cultures of the Gulf South region, including the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, as well as the Carribean, Latin America and the African Diaspora.

Free streaming of documentary and animated films as well as interactive stories from and about Canada. Includes an Aboriginal Peoples channel which offers an in-depth look at important issues in Aboriginal communities.

The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings. At launch, the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others.

The Library provides access to a portion of its audio collections through the Recorded Sound Reference Center' s web page, the American Memory site, The Performing Arts Encyclopedia and the American Folklife Center pages. All available collections are described and linked here.

OIMA is an online repository for new and emerging Canadian musicians in all genres to post and share their work with the public. It also collects, preserves and promotes older independent music from across the province that was originally produced in small batches on vinyl, cassette and CD, making it available to new audiences.

Brazil's National Library has begun putting the oldest of their several thousand 78s on-line. Currently some 8,000 are available, and you can search by composer, performer, song title, genre and label/studio.

Open Folklore–now being created by the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries–will make both published and unpublished materials available for folklore studies. Includes folk music, books, journals, conference abstracts, white papers, program notes, exhibition catalogs, websites, and course syllabi.

The Plateau Peoples' Web Portal is a collaboration between the Spokan Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe, and the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University.

Mexico is the country with the largest indigenous population in America, with 62 existing native languages. A multimedia team will travel Mexican territory to generate an audio library with live native languages, available online to the international community.

There are six radio streams from the holdings of the Southern Folklife Collection (SFC): North Carolina, Memphis, Jimmie Rodgers (the Father of Country Music), New Orleans, SFC Mix, African-American Music.

Two channels of programs are available, with each channel playing a unique sequence of 352 shows in an ongoing loop. The arrangement is thematic, covering topics such as women in jazz, spirituals, hymns & the blues, civil rights, and hot spots like New Orleans, Chicago, Harlem, San Francisco, and Texas. Many programs focus on the lives and works of musicians, singers, and composers such as Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller, George and Ira Gershwin, and Cole Porter among many more.

This Archive features interviews from Terkel's hour-long daily radio show which ran from 1952 to 1998 on WFMT in Chicago. Interviews include prominent figures such as jazz, blues, folk, classical and world musicians.

The mission of the Sípnuuk Digital Library, Archives and Museum (Sípnuuk) is to manage, share and enhance understanding of Karuk history, language, traditions, natural resource management and living culture following the cultural protocols of the Karuk Tribe and in support of the missions of the Karuk Tribe, Department of Natural Resources, People’s Center and Karuk Tribal Libraries, Archives and Museums. Subject areas include: Native foods and fibers, cultural practices related to the management of natural resources, the traditional knowledge and skills of Native people, Karuk language and culture.

Provides online access to a digital collection of nearly 8,000 cylinder recordings held by the University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Special Collections.

Provides online access to audio and video recordings of Upper Skagit elder Vi Hilbert's Collection in the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives and features Hilbert's work as a storyteller, teacher, and culture bearer.

WesScholar (Wesleyan's digital repository), currently hosts materials to accompany Mark Slobin's book, "Music at Wesleyan."