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(b Durrës, Albania, Jan 20, 1914; d Tirana, Albania, March 30, 1977). Albanian folk music researcher and composer. Born into an intellectual family, he studied music in Bucharest (1936) and later Milan (1939) before returning to Albania during World War II. Initially, Dheri was appointed music instructor at the high school in Shkodra, where he organized small ensembles and choral groups following the war. In 1949, he was transferred to the Committee for the Arts and Culture in Tirana and, in 1953, to Radio Tirana. During this period, Dheri contributed to the Radio’s sound archives, collected and transcribed folk pieces, created pedagogical texts, and composed light popular waltzes, tangos, and foxtrots. His primary contribution followed his appointment to the newly formed Institute of Folk Culture in 1968. As an editor and the founding director of the national archives for folk music, Dheri oversaw the publication of early systematic collections including ...

(b El Carnero, CO, Sept 12, 1880; d Palo Alto, CA, Sept 4, 1958). American folklorist and educator. Born in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado to a prominent Hispano family with deep roots in New Mexico, Espinosa was one of the first US- born Latinos to earn a teaching post at an American university. Although folklorists without formal training such as Charles Fletcher Lummis and Eleanor Hague studied Spanish-language folksongs of the Southwest, Espinosa made the folksongs of Spanish-speaking peoples a legitimate area for scholarly research at a time when individuals of Hispano, Mexican, or Latino heritage were generally discouraged from pursuing higher education. Like Lummis and Hague, Espinosa viewed this repertory as Spanish American rather than Mexican and believed that New Mexican folksong had more in common with Spanish antecedents than with traditional Mexican song. Espinosa was the New Mexican analogue to Francis James Child. Unlike Child, he collected folk ballads from local people in person, although, like Child, he did not study the music that went with the texts he gathered. Espinosa published more than 175 scholarly articles and about a dozen longer monographs, as well as 30 Spanish textbooks. He served as associate editor of the ...

(b Romania, 1930; d Copenhagen, 4 April 2015). Romanian-Danish ethnochoreologist. She worked as a researcher at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest from 1953 to 1979. She contributed to the foundation and development of scientific research on traditional dance in Romania, where she conducted extensive fieldwork, filming dances and rituals in over 200 villages. Her main interests concerned the contextual study of dance, the analysis of dance structure, the processes of dance improvisation, and dance as an identity marker for the Roma minority group. She also investigated the way traditional symbols were manipulated in Romania for national and political power legitimation.

After 1980 she lived in Denmark, where she conducted research on topics such as continuity and change in the traditional culture of the Vlachs (a Romanian speaking ethnic minority of Serbia) living in Denmark, the Romanian healing ritual căluş, and on the theory and methods of field research in contemporary society. She was the Honorary Chairperson of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology and the leader of the Sub-Study Group on Fieldwork Theory and Methods, a Board member of Danish National Committee for ICTM, and Doctor Honoris Causa of Roehampton University, London. She had a great number of publications and a fruitful activity as a lecturer on an international level. In her last years, she worked with Margaret Beissinger and Speranța Rădulescu on the volume ...

(b Bangor, ME, Sept 2, 1888; d Washington, DC, March 26, 1961). American folklorist and folksong collector. He was a pioneer in making audio recordings of folksongs on wax cylinders. He studied English at Harvard under the ballad scholar George Lyman Kittredge. He was hired by the University of California, Berkeley in 1918. While in California, he spent time on the San Francisco and Oakland docks learning sea shanties, eventually documenting over a thousand of them, at least 300 of which he recorded on cylinders. In 1923, he began writing the column “Old Songs That Men Have Sung” in the pulp magazine Adventure. In the column, he printed verses of folksongs and solicited new songs and new verses from readers. In this way, he amassed a large collection of songs and a wide network of correspondents. This did not help him in his academic career, however, and he lost his position at Berkeley in ...

(b Winnipeg, Manitoba, June 29, 1917; d San Francisco, CA, March 22, 2009). Folklorist, music scholar, and labor activist of Canadian birth; naturalized American. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Green worked as a road builder, a firefighter, a shipwright, and a carpenter, and joined the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. Green enrolled in graduate school in 1958, earning the Master’s in Library Science and the PhD in folklore. He progressed to a distinguished career as a professor, scholar, and librarian.

As a scholar Green was best known for work on occupational folklore and early hillbilly recordings. He combined these interests in his first book, Only a Miner (1972). He went on to write many other books, as well as articles in Appalachian Journal, the Journal of American Folklore, Labor’s Heritage, Musical Quarterly, and other periodicals and anthologies. Green’s most recent publication is ...

(b San Francisco, CA, Nov 7, 1875; d Flintridge, CA, Dec 25, 1954). American folklorist, writer, lecturer, music patron, and singer. Born into a wealthy family (her father James Hague was a prominent geologist and mining engineer), she used her inheritance to support her research into Latin American music, particularly Mexican American and Mexican folksong. Prior to moving to Pasadena, California, in 1920, she lived in New York and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She studied music privately in France and Italy, was a member of the New York Oratorio Society, and directed church choirs in New York before she began work as a folklorist and folksinger by the early 1910s (she gave guitar-accompanied folksong recitals in that decade). Hague published numerous collections and studies of Mexican American, Mexican, and other Latin American folksongs; translated (with Marion Leffingwell) Julián Ribera y Tarragó’s Historia de la música árabe medieval y su influencia en la española...

[Jane Rogovin]

(b New York, NY, 17 March 1922; d London, England, 12 Sept 1990). American ethnomusicologist and curator. Although born and reared in the Bronx, Jenkins portrayed herself as having been brought up in rural Arkansas surrounded by Ozark folk music. As a teenager, she learnt an extensive repertoire of folksongs and became active in American folk music circles. Like many folksingers of the era, Jenkins espoused socialism. She studied anthropology and musicology in Missouri but her support of trade unions and civil rights attracted the scrutiny of the FBI.

Her move to London in 1950 placed Jenkins beyond the reach of McCarthyism. There she continued her studies and secured leave to remain in the UK by marrying Clive Jenkins, a prominent trade union leader. In 1960 she became the first Keeper of Musical Instruments of the Horniman Museum and commenced fieldwork. She traveled in the USSR, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and southern Europe to record and to build up a comparative collection of instruments for the Horniman. Jenkins organized exhibitions and published as curatorial duties permitted, but recording was her enduring legacy to ethnomusicology. She considered her banjo to be her most important piece of fieldwork equipment and she played to other musicians to encourage them to participate in recordings. Keen to capture music she perceived to be vanishing, she recorded more than 700 field tapes. Her frequent BBC broadcasts and commercially issued recordings introduced music from Asia and Africa to UK audiences and paved the way for the explosion of interest in ‘world music’. Jenkins’s original recordings and an archive of fieldwork photographs are held by the National Museums of Scotland....

Member of Lomax family

(b Austin, Jan 21, 1921; d Portland, Nov 27, 2009). American folk music performer, scholar and arts administrator, daughter of John Lomax. She was introduced to folk music and music scholarship at an early age and was educated at the University of Texas (1937–8), Bryn Mawr College (BA 1941) and the University of California (MA 1970). From 1941 to 1952 she was a member of the Almanac Singers and participated in the recording of such albums as Talking Union, Citizen CIO, American Folk Songs and Songs of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. She continued her work in folk music after being appointed assistant professor of anthropology in 1963 at California State College, Northridge, where she rose to the rank of professor in 1974. In 1977 she became director of the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment of the Arts; she is credited with establishing folk arts programmes in virtually every state and territory of the USA by the time of her retirement in ...

Member of Lomax family

(b Austin, TX, Jan 15, 1915; d Sarasota, FL, July 19, 2002). American folksong scholar, son of John Lomax. He was educated at Harvard University (1932–3), the University of Texas (BA 1936) and Columbia University (where he did graduate work in anthropology in 1939). In 1937 he began working under his father in the Archive of American Folksong, Library of Congress. He worked for the Office of War Information and US Army Special Services during World War II, and served Decca Records Inc. as Director of Folk Music (1946–9). He produced numerous educational radio and television programmes on folk music for use in the USA and Great Britain (such as the ‘American Patchwork’ series produced for PBS, 1990) and recorded and studied folksong in Great Britain, Haiti, Italy, Spain, the USA and elsewhere. He served on the boards of several American folk festivals and lectured at various American universities (Chicago, Columbia, Indiana, New York). In ...

Member of Lomax family

(b Goodman, MS, Sept 23, 1867; d Greenville, MS, Jan 26, 1948). American folksong collector. While studying for his MA at Harvard (1906–7) he was encouraged by his professors George L. Kittredge and Barrett Wendell to collect the folksongs of cowboys in Texas, where he had grown up. This work resulted in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), one of the first important collections of American folksong. He collected and published only sporadically between 1910 and 1932, after which he undertook a nationwide lecture and collecting tour that produced American Ballads and Folk Songs (with Alan Lomax, 1934), hailed as the largest single collection of indigenous American song to that time.

Lomax became curator of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress in 1933 and played a major role in its development. With support from the library and other government agencies, he and his son Alan made field recording trips throughout the 1930s, mostly in the South and Southwest, pioneering the use of instantaneous disc recording equipment for that purpose and eventually depositing in the archive recordings of more than 4000 folksongs. Among their discoveries was the black folk-blues artist Leadbelly, whom they found in prison in Louisiana in ...

(b Louisville, KY, Oct 20, 1877; d Louisville, KY, Feb 24, 1919). American composer and folksong collector. She had no formal training as a composer. At the suggestion of May Stone of the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County (Kentucky), she spent the summer of 1914 in Knott and Letcher counties transcribing folksongs and tracing their origins to English and Scottish ballads. By her own description the people of the area called her “the strange woman huntin’ song-ballets.” She published Folk-songs of the Kentucky Mountains (1917, repr. 1922, 1926, 1937), in which 13 of the 20 songs are traced to precursors in Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98). At a time when many American composers turned to folk music as the source of a distinctive voice, McGill’s activities contributed to the search for an American national music. Among her own compositions are the songs “Duna, when I was a little lad” (...

(b Reuseni, Suceava county, Romania, May 2, 1944). Romanian composer, musicologist, and teacher . Rooted in the folklore of Bukovina and in Byzantine liturgical music, furthering the musical environment of his predecessors Ciprian Porumbescu and George Enescu, his works stand at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, having become established through their authentic expression and mastery of form. His personality has been influential in the musical life of Iaşi and the George Enescu University of Arts, which he served as a professor, dean, and rector.

He studied at the George Enescu Conservatory in Iaşi. He graduated in pedagogy and composition under Vasile Spătărelu. He attended composition classes led by Ştefan Niculescu, Aurel Stroe, and Anatol Vieru at the Vacanţele muzicale de la Piatra Neamt (‘Musical Holidays of Piatra Neamţ’, 1972–80), and then he studied with Roman Vlad at the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome (1980). Up until ...

(b Arroyo Hondo, NM, Aug 14, 1900; d Menlo Park, CA, Nov 8, 1993). American folklorist and linguist. Born in a village near Taos to a Hispano (Spanish-speaking New Mexican) family that raised sheep and cattle, Rael attended Saint Michael’s College (Santa Fe) and the Christian Brothers’ College (St. Louis). He earned the BA (St. Mary’s College, Oakland, CA, 1923), MA (University of California, Berkeley, 1927), and PhD (Stanford University, 1937). New Mexican folklorist and linguist Aurelio M. Espinosa (1880–1958) guided Rael’s 1937 dissertation on New Mexican Spanish, which later supported his Cuentos Españoles de Colorado y Nuevo Mexico (1977), probably his most important study. After teaching Spanish at the University of Oregon (1927–34), he taught at Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1965.

Along with Espinosa, Arthur L. Campa, Rubén Cobos, and John Donald Robb, Rael led the way in studying traditional Hispano music and folklore. He examined ...

(b Pittsburgh, PA, Jan 29, 1915; d Paterson, NJ, March 18, 1995). American writer on jazz, record producer, and folklorist. He coedited one of the first scholarly books on jazz with Charles Edward Smith, Jazzmen: the Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men who Created It (New York, 1939). Supported in part by Guggenheim Fellowships (1953, 1955), Ramsey conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the American South, photographing African American life and recording interviews and music. The results of his travels are detailed in his books Been Here and Gone (New Brunswick, NJ, 1960) and Where the Music Started (New Brunswick, NJ, 1970). Many of his field recordings were released by Folkways Records as Music of the South (1954). He produced a historical anthology of recordings for Folkways titled Jazz (1950–53). Later, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (...

(b Sibiu, Romania, March 27, 1940). Romanian composer, professor, and musicologist of German ancestry. His works are inspired by the folklore and academic art of the Transylvanian Saxons, while also manifesting a moderate tendency to assimilate modern idioms. Published especially by German and Swiss houses, his compositions gained him international prestige within German-language circles. Additionally, he pursued his vocation as a researcher by analysing the works of J.S. Bach and of Transylvanian musicians, especially Gabriel Reilich and Paul Richter. He studied at the Conservatory of Cluj (1959–65) with Sigismund Toduţă (composition), Cornel Tăranu (harmony), and Vasile Herman (musical forms). He took the Ph.D. in musicology from the Music Academy of Cluj-Napoca (1978) with a thesis called Contradominanta în creaţia lui W.A. Mozart (‘The Counter-Dominant in the Works of W.A. Mozart’). As a professor in the harmony/composition department of the Cluj-Napoca Conservatory, Türk developed significant treatises and courses, including the book ...