![]() Then, in 1956, Sidney and Henry received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to travel the world for a year. She recorded musicians she met at the White Top Festival in Virginia in the mid-1940s in Appalachia with Maud Karpeles in September 1950 in Cape Breton Island in 1953 and in the Aran Islands in 1955, a trip that was inspired by Henry's encounter with the stars of Man of Aran in New York in 1934. After she married Henry Cowell in 1941, Sidney's collecting activities became infrequent. In 1938 she began a groundbreaking folk music project in California but it ended when government funding ran dry in 1940. Brown in North Carolina in July 1936 but, irritated by what she regarded as the shortcomings of their methods and motives, she soon struck out alone.īy 1937 Sidney was in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Chicago area recording from a huge variety of European ethnicities, thus generating greater diversity of recorded material beyond the Native American, African American, French, and Spanish music captured in America previously. Sidney's first recording fieldtrip was with John A. Her career as a folk music collector began formally in 1936 after she left New York to join Charles Seeger and his team at the Resettlement Administration in Washington D.C. They divorced in 1934 and Sidney moved to New York in 1935 where she worked in the Henry Street Settlement School (where Jean Ritchie would later work too). ![]() They lived for a time in Europe to enable his studies and later in Palo Alto, California, where Sidney took secretarial jobs and taught music. Upon graduating from Stanford University in 1924 with a degree in Romance Languages and Philosophy, she married Kenneth Robertson. ![]() On my early morning commute - early to avoid the heat and humidity after sunrise - I would climb Capitol Hill from Union Station saying to myself: "I can't believe I work here!"īorn the eldest daughter of Charles and Mabel Hawkins in San Francisco in 1903, Sidney had a relatively privileged upbringing featuring lessons in languages, music, dancing, horse-riding, fencing and cooking along with home-schooling and educational visits to Europe. The magic of being part of the Library of Congress for a while never got old. I could consult expert staff and primary materials in the Library's American Folklife Center and its Music Division in the morning and in the afternoon take the Metro to the Ralph Rinzler Archives in the Smithsonian Institute to view their Folkways holdings, some of which have since been digitized. Living for over a year in the same country and eventually in the same city as the archives themselves was a boon to my work. In 2012 I had the privilege of becoming the first Irish person to hold the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies (since renamed) hosted by the John W. In 2011 I moved to the University of Notre Dame to begin turning my research on music collectors and the practice of collecting music in Ireland into a book with the help of their postdoctoral NEH Keough Fellowship. Their Irish archive of photographs and recordings is held at NUI Galway and further Irish materials are available at the Library of Congress. Sadly, they did not bring any sound recording equipment to Aran, but George took some wonderful photographs. Over a pot of tea, they told me they had stayed in my grandmother's guesthouse when they spent a week in Aran in November 1952 (though I now wonder if perhaps they actually stayed in the guesthouse next door, Kilmurvey House). ![]() He must also have helped me connect with Jean Ritchie and her photographer husband George Pickow because, by March 2001, I was sitting in their kitchen in Port Washington, Long Island. ![]() Ó Cróinín in the History Department at NUI Galway and he handed me a stack of letters: his correspondence with the Library of Congress, which holds the majority of Sidney Robertson Cowell's archive. My ears pricked when I heard that both women had visited my home, the Aran Islands.īy October 2000 I was in the Department of Music at University College Cork beginning my postgraduate research on the music of the Aran Islands. Their names were Jean Ritchie and Sidney Robertson Cowell. Ó Cróinín learned of two American women collectors who had recorded traditional music in Ireland in the 1950s. In the course of tracing evidence of his grandmother's singing, Prof. He was interviewing Dáibhí Ó Cróinín about his new book, The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin. It was a sunny Sunday morning in May 2000, a few weeks before my final year exams in Music at Oxford, and I was listening via longwave to Ciarán Mac Mathúna's weekly programme on RTÉ Radio One. I remember well the moment I first heard of Sidney Robertson Cowell. ![]()
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