Frances Densmore

Frances Densmore (1867 to 1957) was an American anthropologist and ethnographer from Minnesota who studied Native American music and culture and is now often described as an ethnomusicologist. Born in Red Wing, Minnesota, she grew up hearing Dakota singing nearby and studied music at Oberlin College for three years; her interest in Native American music was prompted in part by the work of Alice Cunningham Fletcher. From 1907 she recorded music for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, and over more than fifty years she collected thousands of recordings, many now held in the Library of Congress, from peoples including the Ojibwe, Mandan, Hidatsa, Sioux, Pawnee, Menominee and Seminole. Between 1910 and 1957 she published fourteen book-length bulletins for the Smithsonian, and Raymond DeMallie called her Teton Sioux Music and Culture one of the most significant ethnographic works ever published on the Sioux.