Teton Sioux Music and Culture

Frances Densmore’s modestly titled “Teton Sioux Music and Culture” is one of the many volumes that resulted from her prolific life-long project to record and transcribe the traditional music of American Indian peoples. The book explores the role of music in all aspects of Sioux life, and is a classic of the descriptive genre produced by members of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Music serves as the vehicle for organizing this detailed account of traditional religion, warfare, and social life, enriched by first-person narrations by the Lakota men and women who worked with Densmore from 1911 to l914 to preserve their songs by means of a wax cylinder recorder, the modern technology of that period. The evident quality of the narratives (translations from Lakota) as well as the complete transcription and translation of all the Lakota lyrics to the songs, resulted from Densmore’s close collaboration with Robert P. Higheagle, who shared her dedication to the project and was an exceptionally capable translator and cultural mediator. The material recorded here on such topics as dreams and visions, healing, the Sun Dance, and buffalo hunting – all with appropriate musical transcriptions and song lyrics – makes “Teton Sioux Music and Culture” one of the most significant ethnographic works ever published on the Sioux, as well as an important land-mark in the study of ethnomusicology.” – Raymond J. DeMallie, author of “The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt” (1984), also available as a “Bison Book”.