212 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
One pioneering ethnomusicologist was Frances Densmore, who began
recording American Indian music in 1907 and by the time of her death at age
ninety in 1957 had collected more than two thousand tribal songs. Her mono-
graph Teton Sioux Music (1918) includes transcriptions and analyses of six hun-
dred songs she collected at Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota in 1911–14.
One of those songs, “A Buffalo Said to Me,” is also preserved on an Edison cylin-
der (LG 9.1). The singer, Tatan ka-ohi tika (Brave Buffalo), was about seventy-
three years old when he sang this song for Densmore’s recording machine. His
people, the Teton Sioux, also called the Lakota, are one of the seven distinct
tribes that make up the Sioux nation, which in turn is part of the large Northern
Plains Indian group. Since the eighteenth century the Lakota have lived in the
area that is now North and South Dakota. Until the late nineteenth century they
depended on the buffalo hunt for subsistence, supplemented with corn, which
they received in trade with their eastern neighbors.
Densmore’s cylinders are clearly a more accurate means of preserving
American Indian music than transcription, which, as Alice Fletcher observed,
falls short of capturing subtle nuances of performance, especially intonation.
The recording of “A Buffalo Said to Me” reveals details about Teton vocal tim-
bre, vibrato, and rhythmic nuance that are impossible to notate. Yet Densmore’s
primitive equipment was far from ideal. For instance, because the delicate record-
ing machine was easily overwhelmed by sharp, percussive sounds, Densmore
had to ask her informants to omit the drumming that was often an essential part
of the musical texture. In her commentary for “A Buffalo Said to Me” she notes
that Brave Buffalo also sang the song for her with a steady drumbeat that did notK Frances Densmore, with
an Edison cylinder machine,
and Mountain Chief, leader
of the Montana Blackfeet,
in Washington, D.C., March
1916.LG 9.1172028_09_205-230_r3_ko.indd 212 23/01/13 11:28 AM