The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection contains over 3,000 hours of recordings from all over the world. The collection includes songs, stories, and instrumental music from a wide variety of cultures and traditions.

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection – an overview

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection is one of the largest and most significant collections of folk music in the world. It contains over 12,000 recordings, as well as manuscripts, photographs, films, and videos. The collection reflects the vast diversity of America’s musical traditions, with a particular focus on vernacular music – the music of everyday people.

The Folk Music Collection was established in 1928 with a donation of more than 500 discs from George Certain, a New York City musicologist. Since then, it has continued to grow through donations and purchases from individuals, institutions, and commercial vendors. The collection is particularly strong in field recordings made by folklorists during the first half of the twentieth century. These recordings capture the music of groups who were often marginalized or forgotten by mainstream society – including immigrants, laborers, rural residents, and African Americans.

The Folk Music Collection is an important resource for scholars, students, ethnomusicologists, historians, and anyone with an interest in American vernacular music. It provides a window into the lives and cultures of ordinary people – people whose stories might otherwise be untold.

The history of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

Since its inception in the early 1950s, the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection has amassed a wealth of recordings, fieldwork materials, and supporting documentation on the musical traditions of the United States and beyond. This wealth of resources has supported generations of research, performance, and education on traditional music and dance.

The collection began with a focus on American folk music, but soon expanded to include traditional music from around the world. In the late 1950s, the collection began to focus on fieldwork recordings of American Indian music, which continues to be an important area of focus. The collection has also been home to important collections of commercial recordings, including country music, blues, jazz, and rock & roll.

In recent years, the collection has continued to grow and evolve to meet the changing needs of researchers and educators. The addition of digital technology has allowed for greater access to the collection’s resources, and new initiatives have been developed to support interdisciplinary research on music and culture.

The mission of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

Folk music—like all music—is constantly evolving. The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection documents these changes, preserving traditional and contemporary songs, music videos, and concert recordings from around the world.

The mission of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection is to collect, document, preserve, and make available folk music from all cultures and nations. The focus of the collection is on music that is rooted in the traditions of a community or ethnic group. However, we also collect music that reflects new or changing styles within a community or group.

The significance of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection is not only an important repository of recorded folk music from the United States, but also a significant body of work that documents the history and evolution of American folk music.

The collection consists of more than 3,000 hours of audio recordings, as well as more than 10,000 published discs and 7,000 manuscripts. The recordings date from the late 19th century to the present day, and document a wide range of musical styles, including blues, bluegrass, country, gospel, jazz, traditional folk music, and world music.

The collection is especially strong in its representation of folk music from the southern United States. Many of the recordings were made by fieldworkers who traveled throughout the region to document the musical traditions of rural communities. These fieldworkers often had a deep knowledge of the music and culture they were recording, and their work provides an invaluable record of America’s musical heritage.

The scope of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The mission of the Folklife Center is to document and disseminate American folk and traditional arts and to help conserve cultural heritage for future generations. The Folk Music Collection was founded in 1928 when Charles Seeger, then Chief of the Music Division, acquired the library of folk song manuscripts assembled by noted folklorist and musician John Lomax. The Lomax Collection became the nucleus of what has become one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of field recordings, commercial recordings, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, printed ephemera, and moving images documenting many genres of American vernacular music.

The holdings of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection holds over 3,000 hours of field recordings, commercial sound recordings, concert and radio transcriptions, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and videos documenting vernacular music traditions throughout the United States and around the world. The collection includes materials in more than 300 languages and dialects, representing over 90 countries.

The use of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection is one of the world’s most important centers for field recordings and print music of traditional music. The collection contains over 3,000 hours of recorded music and more than 100,000 items in print, including sheet music, songbooks, discographies, and reference works. The collection is used by scholars, educators, students, performers, and music lovers from all over the world.

The future of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection contains more than 3,000 recordings of traditional music from around the world. The collection is housed at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., and is available for research and educational use.

The collection includes music from the early days of field recording to contemporary recordings of traditional music. The majority of the collection is from the United States, but there are also recordings from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands. The collection includes a wide variety of music genres, including blues, country, gospel, jazz, folk, rock, and world music.

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection is one of the largest collections of its kind in the world and is an important resource for folk musicians and scholars. The collection is also a key part of the Smithsonian’s efforts to preserve and promote traditional music and culture.

The impact of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection is one of the most important and influential contributors to the field of traditional music studies. The Collection contains recordings of more than 3,000 musicians from around the world, representing over 50 cultures. The recordings cover a wide range of musical styles, including folk, blues, jazz, bluegrass, country, old-time, traditional music from many parts of the world. The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection has been used by scholars and researchers to study the history and evolution of traditional music, to document endangered musical traditions, and to revive forgotten musical genres.

The importance of the Smithsonian Folk Music Collection

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection contains over three thousand recordings of instrumental music, songs, and story-telling from the United States and around the world. The recordings, which date from 1928 to the present, document the musical traditions of cultural groups, communities, and individuals.

The folk music genre includes a wide range of musical styles, including country, blues, jazz, folk rock, and pop. TheCollection includes recordings of traditional folk music as well as contemporary folk music. The recordings are available online and can be heard in the National Museum of American History’s Archives Center.

The Smithsonian Folk Music Collection is an important resource for understanding the history and culture of the United States and its people. The recordings provide insight into the lives of people who have made America their home. Through these recordings we can learn about the diverse experiences and traditions that have shaped our country.