MUSC 3045 - World Music Across Cultures: Advanced: North America

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.
less...
These are the recordings made during Jesse Walter Fewkes' research trip to Maine in March of 1890. The trip was undertaken so he could test the Edison Phonograph in field conditions, and bring back sample recordings to various groups and universities in Boston before his trip to the Southwest later that year. These recordings were the first ethnographic phongraph recordings ever made, and were pivotal to further fieldwork with the Edison phonograph. After Fewkes' work with the Passamaquoddy, he went on to publish many journal articles and transcriptions of Passamaquoddy stories, which can also be found in this collection.

A nonprofit organization rooted in the life's work of its founder Chris Strachwitz and his acclaimed independent label Arhoolie Records. Our mission is to document and celebrate blues, Cajun, zydeco, gospel, jazz, Tejano/Norteño, old-time, and other tradition-based styles of music through archival preservation, exhibits, community and educational outreach, live performance, and direct support to artists.

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.

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.

This elaborate New Deal project was organized and directed by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell for the Northern California Work Projects Administration. Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center), this undertaking was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-language folk music in one region of the United States.

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.

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.

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.

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.