Frances Theresa Densmore (May 21, 1867 – June 5, 1957) was an American anthropologist and ethnographer from Minnesota. Densmore studied Native American music and culture, and in modern terms, she may be described as an ethnomusicologist.

Frances Densmore (born May 21, 1867, Red Wing, Minn., U.S.—died June 5, 1957, Red Wing) was an ethnologist, foremost American authority of her time on the songs and music of American Indian tribes, and widely published author on Indian culture and life-styles.

Frances Densmore devoted over fifty years of her life to the study and preservation of American Indian music. In collaboration with the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, she amassed a collection of thousands of song recordings, including twenty-four hundred transcribed songs.

From the 1890s through the 1950s, Frances Densmore researched and recorded the music of Native Americans. Through more than twenty books, 200 articles, and some 2,500 Graphophone recordings, she preserved important cultural traditions that might otherwise have been lost.

2024年9月5日 · Densmore began her work in Minnesota, observing and recording the cultures of the Dakota and Ojibwe, and then traveled across North America preserving the customs and traditions of many Native American tribes.

When Frances Densmore (1867 – 1957) was a young girl in Minnesota in the 1870s, she lived near a Dakota village. She often heard the Dakotas singing. She loved music, and the traditional songs of the Dakotas influenced her later career. Frances Densmore studied music after she finished high school. She taught piano lessons in St. Paul, Minnesota.

2022年11月3日 · Frances Densmore (May 21, 1867–June 5, 1957) — a young music teacher from Red Wing, Minnesota — was appalled. In consonance with the eternal truth that the best way to complain is to create, she set out to singlehandedly preserve a vital aspect of indigenous culture, the one art that is the heartbeat of every culture: music. Frances Densmore

2020年5月27日 · At the age of 87, in 1954, Frances Densmore gave a series of seminars on Indian music at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Three years later, she died of pneumonia and heart failure at home in Red Wing, Minnesota, just two weeks after her 90th birthday.

Frances Densmore devoted her entire life to recording and preserving American Indians’ music and customs. Inspired from childhood by the sound of Indians singing and drumming, by the end of her life she had accumulated thousands of recordings and transcriptions of songs, and over twenty monographs and reports for public and professional journals.

American who was pioneer in the study of Native American music and a founder of the field of ethno-musicology. Born Frances Theresa Densmore in Red Wing, Minnesota, on May 21, 1867; died in Red Wing, Minnesota, on June 5, 1957; daughter of Benjamin (a civil engineer) and Sarah (Greenland) Dens-more; attended Oberlin Conservatory of Music.