• collected by Frances Densmore, working for the American Bureau of Ethnology
  
  
• corpus of rougly 2,500 transcriptions of Native American songs collected from some 30 indigenous groups across North America
  
  
• collected from 1907 to 1954; most collected between 1907 and 1935
  
  
• 79 field trips to 54 locations
  
  
• mostly collected from elderly singers (50-85 years of age) who learned the songs as children/adolescents; hence songs can be reliably dated to pre-twentieth century (pre-radio)