A Century of Folklore Training
Indiana University’s Graduate Program and the Making of American Ethnomusicology

About this book:

In the rolling hills of southern Indiana, far from the Ivy League, an unlikely academic revolution took root. *A Century of Folklore Training* reveals how Indiana University Bloomington became the global cradle of American folklore and ethnomusicology, transforming a regional effort to catalog Hoosier tall tales into the intellectual architecture of two disciplines. Through the visionary—and often contentious—leadership of giants like Stith Thompson, Richard Dorson, and Alan Merriam, IU built the world’s premier sound archive, forged the "Bloomington School," and mandated a rigorous, field-based methodology that turned graduate students into the architects of modern cultural study.

This definitive history traces the program’s evolution across twenty-five pivotal chapters, navigating the seismic theoretical shifts from historical-geographic mapping and structuralism to performance theory, reflexive ethnography, and the urgent contemporary imperatives of decolonization and digital preservation. It illuminates the classroom debates, archival breakthroughs, and interpersonal dynamics that trained generations of scholars to document African expressive culture, Native American musical sovereignty, Latin American soundscapes, and local Indiana traditions with equal rigor and ethical care.

More than an institutional chronicle, this is the story of a diaspora. As IU alumni dispersed to chair departments, curate national museums, and shape public arts policy worldwide, they carried the "Indiana way" into the DNA of global academia. Drawing on deep archival research and oral histories, *A Century of Folklore Training* offers an essential map of where our disciplines have been—and a provocative blueprint for where they must go next. For anyone who believes that understanding human song, story, and tradition is vital to our shared humanity, this volume is an indispensable inheritance.