Upon hearing the word “folk,” most students
automatically think of something like the hokey song
“She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.” When they
see the word “archive,” images of a dusty, dingy,
dilapidated room with rats and spiderwebs come to mind.
It’s no wonder the D.K. Wilgus Archive of Folksong and
Music at UCLA is counting on noted advocates to dispel these
general misconceptions and remind people of the school’s rich
history of folk music.
“The popular, or unpopular, image of archives is old,
musty, boring places, which is totally not the case,” UCLA
ethnomusicology archivist John Vallier said. “What we try to
do is make the music in the archive more accessible by staging
performances and playing it on UCLA radio.”
Last fall, the D.K. Wilgus Archive of Folksong and Music, which
consists of approximately 8,000 commercially-recorded albums of
traditional music, song and narrative as well as 1,000
field-recorded tapes, was transferred from the department of
folklore and mythology to the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the
third-largest of its kind in the United States.
“We’re primarily a sound-recording archive and the
only one on campus so it makes sense to transfer the folklore
archives here since it’s very similar to
ethnomusicology,” Vallier said. “We used to be careful
not to collect in the same area because funds are limited. Now
it’s great that we can complement each other.”
Professor Patrick Polk, who served as the Folklore and Mythology
Program archivist, believes the merging helps the preservation of
American folk music at UCLA and opens more doors to the public.
“Professor Wilgus was the resident expert on American folk
music and contributed a lot to the program, including a vast
archive of folk music he and his students amassed throughout the
country,” Polk said. “However, the archive was just a
private collection for his and his students’ research. The
recent merging provides much more access for everyone.”
Wilgus was not the first to teach folklore at UCLA (Wayland D.
Hand established folklore studies during the 1930s), but he was
arguably the most important. In 1965, Wilgus and Hand founded the
Folklore and Mythology program. The Folk Revival of the late 1950s
had infused new interest in American folk music (a tribute to the
period is being held Saturday at Royce). It only became natural for
college campuses across the country to start establishing programs
involving folk music.
“Professor Wilgus was an energetic man who was concerned
with documenting and presenting folk music,” Polk said.
“He was responsible for several historic folk festivals
during the 1960s and 1970s.”
The large number of folklore graduate students researching folk
music around the country during that time were directly linked to
Wilgus. Many have become foremost authorities on American folk
music.
A former director at the prestigious Archives of Traditional
Music at Indiana University, Professor Anthony Seeger is another
huge proponent of folk music archives. His main focus since his
hiring in 2000 has been teaching, but Seeger often consults with
Vallier, who was a student in Seeger’s archiving course.
Many know of Seeger’s Uncle Pete Seeger, one of the most
significant folksingers of the 20th century. However his
grandfather, Charles Seeger, a professor at UCLA from 1957 to 1961,
shaped much of what ethnomusicology is all about in this
institution.
“My grandfather was interested in preserving folk music in
order for future generations to discover it 50 years down the
line,” Seeger said.
Seeger credits films like “O Brother, Where Art
Thou?” for bringing folk music of the 1920s and 1930s to
today’s audience. Its popularity has waned since the days of
the Vietnam War protests. In terms of the peaks and valleys that
the preservation of American folk music has gone through, Seeger
believes that Internet file-sharing has and will continue to alter
how we discover and obtain folk music. It is, after all,
traditional music that reflects people’s lives in a
community.
“Communities themselves can now also make their music
readily available because it’s so easy to put up a Web
site,” Seeger said.
Washington Square Memoirs with Tom Paxton, Loudon Wainwright
III, John Hammond and Mike Seeger comes to Royce Hall Saturday at 8
p.m. Tickets are $25-35 general admission, $15 for students.