Go to mnhs.org Home Become a Member Give a Gift Shop
Home
Feedback
FAQ


Metronet
Minnesota Humanities Commission

Frances Densmore

Biographical Notes

Date of birth: May 21, 1867, Red Wing, Minnesota
Date of death: June 5, 1957, Red Wing, Minnesota

Frances Densmore Frances Theresa Densmore. Ethnohistorian and musician. Studied at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, 1884-86. Taught piano in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1887-89. In 1889 moved to Boston for private lessons with composers Carl Baerman and John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) at Harvard University. Became a student of Indian music and culture in 1893, beginning a relationship with North American Indians, the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, and the Smithsonian Institution that lasted until 1957. Studied with Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) in Chicago in 1898. Began recording Indian songs in 1907. Honorary M.A. degree, Oberlin college, 1924; National Association of American Composers and Conductors award, 1940-41; Doctor of Letters, Macalester College, 1950; and Minnesota Historical Society citation for distinguished service, 1954.

Densmore's professional interest in the music of Native Americans dates from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. In 1905, she made her first visit to a Minnesota tribe, in a Chippewa village near the Canadian border, publishing her observations in the American Anthropologist (April-June 1907). In 1907, she began to record Indian music and successfully petitioned the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology for financial assistance. Thus began her fifty-year association with the bureau, which paid her a yearly stipend and gave her the title of collaborator.

During her years of service to the Smithsonian Institution, Densmore traveled throughout the country to remote Indian reservations and villages, where she recorded on wax cylinders nearly 2,500 songs of the Sioux, Yuma, Cocopa, Yaqui, Pawnee, Northern Ute, and various other tribes whose cultures were already threatened with disappearance. In all, she recorded the songs of some thirty Indian tribes. The entire collection was eventually transferred from wax cylinders to long-playing discs and is preserved in the Smithsonian-Densmore Collection of Indian Sound Recordings. Densmore also collected hundreds of musical instruments, which are housed in the Smithsonian's museums.

Densmore's numerous monographs on Indian music were issued in a series of publications of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. The most important of these are Chippewa Music, Chippewa Music--II, and Teton Sioux Music. Her other publications include The American Indians and Their Music and Cheyenne and Arapaho Music.

(Text in parts reprinted with permission from the Oberlin College Archives)

Selected Works

When you click on the titles below, you will exit the Minnesota Historical Society web site and go to the Minnesota Statewide Project for Automated Library Systems (Web PALS) Web Database. Title searches link directly to our catalog record. Please click on your browser's back button to return.

Additional Resources

Sources used to prepare this author entry

The following bibliography may include links to Web sites that are no longer operable or have changed location. The sources are shown as they existed in the fall of 1999 when the entries were compiled.
  • American Men of Science. p. 278. New York: Science Press, 1933.
  • American Men of Science. p. 604. New York: Science Press, 1949.
  • Angell, Madeline. Red Wing, Minnesota: Saga of a River Town. Minneapolis: Dillon, 1977.
  • Cattell, Jaques. Directory of American Scholars. p. 208. Lancaster, Pa.: The Science Press, 1942.
  • A Century of Music in Minnesota. Minneapolis: Northwestern National Life Insurance Company, 1958.
  • Densmore, Frances.Chippewa Customs. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1979.
  • Dillon, Mary, ed. Who's Who Among Minnesota Women. p. 84. St. Paul: M. D. Foster, 1924.
  • Gopher Historian. Vol. 5, no. 6, p. 16.
  • Gopher Historian. Vol. 6, no. 2, p. 7-9.
  • Gopher Historian. Vol. 24, no. 1, p. 22-23.
  • "Gopher Trails: 1926-27". p. 74-75. St. Paul: St. Paul Dispatch, 1926.
  • Howes, Durward, ed. American Women. Los Angeles, Calif: Richard Blank Publishing Co., 1935.
  • Howes, Durward, ed. American Women. Los Angeles, Calif: American Publications Inc., 1939.
  • Journal of the West . Apr. 1973, Vol. 12, no. 2, p. 214-217. Los Angeles: L. L. and C. S. Morrison, 1973.
  • Minneapolis Star, 1 July 1953, p. 30.
  • Minneapolis Times Tribune, 6 May 1940, p. 15.
  • Minneapolis Tribune, 23 Oct. 1949, p. 11.
  • Minneapolis Tribune, 6 June 1957, p. 25.
  • Minnesota Public Radio. "Frances Densmore, Song Catcher," 1997. Online. Accessed 22 Dec. 1999. http://cobweb.cc.oberlin.edu/~archive/WWW_files/densmore_t.html
  • Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, Mass. Belknap Press of Harvard Unviersity Press, 1980.
  • Oberlin College Archives. "Frances Theresa Densmore, 1867-1957," 15 April 1996. Online. Accessed 13 Aug. 1999. http://news.mpr.org/features/199702/01_smiths_densmore/docs/index.shtml
  • O'Connor, William Van, ed. A History of the Arts in Minnesota. p. 4-5. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958.
  • Red Wing Daily Republican Eagle. 5 June 1957, p. 1.
  • Richards, Carmen. Minnesota Writes. Minneapolis: Lund Press, 1945.
  • St. Paul Dispatch, 30 July 1926, p. 1, 15.
  • St. Paul Pioneer Press, 16 Mar. 1930, Section 3, p. 3.
  • St. Paul Pioneer Press, 21 May 1947, p. 11.
  • St. Paul Pioneer Press, 26 May 1950, p. 32.
  • Stuhler, Barbara, and Gretchen Kreuter, eds. Women of Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1977.
  • Stutheit, Esther, ed. Who's Who in Minnesota. Minneapolis: Minnesota Editorial Association, 1941.
  • Who's Who Among North American Authors, 1933-35.. Los Angeles, Golden Syndicate Publishing Co., 1935.
  • Who's Who in the Central States. Washington, D.C.: Mayflower Publishing Co., 1929.
  • Who's Who of American Women, 1958-59. Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1958.
This pilot database compiled and maintained by the Minnesota Historical Society.
snubnosed