On wax cylinders, aluminum and lacquer discs, open reel tape, wire and cassette tape, Chinese folk songs commingle with Native American narrative songs and Sea Islands protest songs. Here the works of Hoagy Carmichael rub shoulders with traditional songs of the Ainu, a people native to the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan. With over 120,000 audio recordings spread out over 4000 collections, the Archives of Traditional Music is one of the country’s most important repositories of recorded music history. This blog will dive into a handful of the collections available there.
The Lawrence Gellert Collection
Collector Lawrence Gellert (born 1898, disappeared 1979) possessed a sincere, if homegrown, interest in Black folk music. His family immigrated to the US from Hungary in 1905 and settled in the Bronx, where they opened an import business, the Karavan Trading Company. Gellert received no college education but found occasional work in the family business and as a journalist. Active in Left-leaning circles, he became interested in Black folk songs in the mid 1920s while living in North Carolina and ultimately made over 600 field recordings, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. In 1936, he released the book Negro Songs of Protest, which became one of the earliest collections of annotated Black folk protest music. While his collection practices, which included anonymizing his sources, have been criticized in the past, his research is now viewed as crucial to an understanding of the development of American Black protest music.
The Andrew Thomas Carr Collection
Musicologist Andrew Thomas Carr (1902-1976) was instrumental in documenting the music and culture of his native Trinidad and Tobago. A celebrated figure in his homeland, he also recorded songs of the Rada community, a minority ethnic group who practice vodun (also known as voodoo), a form of African spirituality brought to the island nation in 1868 by Abojevi Zahwenu, also known as Robert Antoine and Papa Nannee. Two of Carr’s collections, which are the foundation of his book “A Rada Community in Trinidad” are located at the Archives of Traditional Music. In addition to his recordings at the Archive, he also co-founded the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in 1943 and the Trinidad and Tobago Ethnographic Society, whose goal was the further knowledge and interest in the nation’s folklore.
The George List Colombian Collection
George List (1911-2008) is the former director of the Archives of Traditional Music, having served from 1954 to 1976. He is also considered a foundational figure in ethnomusicology studies and extensively documented Afro-Colombian music, culture and folklore throughout the 1960s. The Archive features over 120 open reel tapes which include stories, interviews and musical forms that in some cases no longer exist in Colombia. He also wrote extensively on his research, publishing a book in 1983 and numerous articles throughout his career.
The Archives of Traditional Music is located on the IU-Bloomington Campus at the Cook Music Library. While the physical media that contains these recordings is often fragile, most of the collection has been digitized and can be heard inside the archive’s Music and Reading Room. However, being a culturally and historically important collection, the Archive has made efforts to respect the material. Certain recordings are restricted for listening to the communities or their descendants that are featured in specific collections. Interested in learning more about world music history? Curious about the field of ethnomusicology? Want to know more about specific collections at the Archives of Traditional Music? Ask Us! iueref@iue.edu.