Robert Winslow Gordon and American Folk Music

Robert Winslow Gordon (1888-1961), a native of Maine, attended Harvard College and taught in the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His monthly column in Adventure Magazine, "Old Songs that Men Sing," attracted attention from readers across the United States, and he received thousands of letters containing songs and queries. In 1928, Gordon became the first archivist of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture) in the Library of Congress. He was a pioneer in using mechanical means to document folk musicians, and his cylinders and discs in the Library of Congress form part of his legacy. The collection of Gordon manuscripts contained here, primarily from 1922 to 1932, offers researchers online access to the daily workings of an important twentieth-century American folklorist.