Folk music: a selection of folk songs, ballads, dances, instrumental pieces, and folk tales of the United States and Latin America; catalog of phonograph records
- Title
- Folk music: a selection of folk songs, ballads, dances, instrumental pieces, and folk tales of the United States and Latin America; catalog of phonograph records
- Full Document
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In April of 1928 Carl Engle, the director of the Library of Congress’ Music Division, announced that Robert Winslow Gordon, the folk song collector, would be appointed as the first director of the Archive of American Folk Song. This archive was to be a national scope collection of folk songs to ensure the preservation of and to recognize the value of folk heritage. As of 1959 when this document was released, the archive’s collection contained 16,000 discs, reels of tape, wires, and cylinders, containing over 60,000 pieces of indigenous American folk music. The archive also houses folk music from areas in Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, etc. This catalog of folk music lists a total of 160 discs, containing a total of 1,148 titles, of the best of the over 16,000 records in the archive.