Whoop Collector

For many years nosy anthropologists have been collecting the ruined dwellings, pottery, clothing and bones of U. S. Indians--a record of how they lived. Other scientific collectors have taken down legends and songs from the lips of aged chiefs and squaws--a record of how they thought.

No. 1 investigator of U. S. Indian music is a spry, 71-year-old, grey-haired woman, Frances Densmore. For the past 45 years, methodical Spinster Densmore has periodically left her old family home in Red Wing, Minn, to traipse over North America salvaging Indian war whoops and love songs, which she stuffed away in her oldfashioned, wax-cylinder recording machine.

Living in isolated Indian villages from British Columbia to Panama, intrepid Investigator Densmore has collected some 2,500 Indian songs and written 20 books about them. Most of the books have been published by Washington's august Smithsonian Institution. Last week the latest of them, a monograph entitled Nootka and Quileute Music, started rolling through the Institution's presses.

Miss Densmore's finds include whole Indian folk operas, entertainments requiring as long as nine hours to perform. Medicine men have confided to her secret therapeutic chants. A typical one is the San Bias Indians' cure for hangover:

I bring sweet-smelling flowers and put them in water,

I dip a cloth in the water and put it around your head,

Then I bring a comb, part your hair smoothly, and make it pretty.

Everyone comes to see you get better.

Many of the songs she has collected have been used as themes by U. S. composers. Plump precise Ethnographer Densmore started out as a conventional musician, studied piano and composition at Oberlin Conservatory and Harvard. But when, at Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1892, she saw Chief Rain-in-the-Face dance with a fringe of human scalps around his coat, she really sat up and took notice.

In 1907 she started making her records in the rear of a music store at Detroit Lakes, Minn. The following year the Smithsonian became so interested in her finds that it decided to back her in a series of expeditions. She traveled alone, making her headquarters in Indian agents' offices, jails, woodsheds and even tribal bake-ovens.

Today, Miss Densmore's principal concern is in getting her thousands of Indian recordings transferred to permanent, standard phonograph discs. Of her past adventures and hardships she speaks modestly. Says she: "I have no special philosophy, but nothing downs me."

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