This is a test post for Digital Sound Studies Project. In order to make this project, I can take a clip of audio that I find compelling and embed it directly into the text of my post. For example, I am interested in the work that Sidney Cowell did as a woman working for the WPA. Her fieldwork created hundreds of recordings with people performing their traditional cultures. For example, Cowell documented the history of square dance calling within Southern communities who moved West because of the Dust Bowl.1
Cowell attempted to create a record of folk culture in the 1930s, and was devoted to creating as objective as a record as possible. Cowell approached as cultural expression as equally valid and deserving of respect and a place within the historical record. As she wrote, “How does one find songs? They are everywhere at hand.”2This legacy is essential to understanding the record from which people have continued to draw in order to locate and define America’s folk cultures. It also represents the spaces available for women like Sidney Cowell to find spaces within the WPA to pursue her own her intellectual and cultural as a program director.
- “Square dance calling accompanying ‘Chicken reel’,” California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017700931/.
- “The Ethnographic Experience: Sidney Robertson Cowell in Northern California,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/sidney-robertson-cowell-northern-california-folk-music/articles-and-essays/the-ethnographic-experience-sidney-robertson-cowell-in-northern-california/.
