American Folksong: Some Comments on the History of Its Collection and Archiving *

Folk music and song are the musical/poetic aspects of folklore. As early as 1906, composers such as Percy Grainger and Bela Bartok recorded folksongs to get accurate documentation of musical materials as sources for their compositions. Carl Engel had some idea of the importance of this kind of documentation, and he persuaded a number of individuals to donate money to start a national folksong archive. Robert W. Gordon, who became the first director of the Archive, had studied at Harvard, taught at Berkeley, and was one of the two folklorists in this country to begin to record Anglo- and Afro-American folksongs with a cylinder machine. Unfortunately, the Archive's private money had dwindled by 1932, and it no longer could offer any salary for a director. Starting around 1935 some other federal agencies formed under the New Deal began actively collecting folklore and folk music.