Huge summary of Laura's travels, with many photos. 

born in Conneaut, Ohio, on January 4, 1899, was a mid-20th century music collector who recorded musical materials from 1929-1942 such as: film, photographs, and audio recordings. Her education consists of a B.A. from Denison University and vocal studies at Western Reserve University, now known as Case Western. She also attended The University of Chicago for graduate school from 1931-1935 but left without a degree. Boulton received grants from The National Film Board of Canada and other institutions which gave  her the opportunity to undertake her many expeditions.

In Boulton’s book, The Music Hunter, written in 1969 with the purpose of encapsulating her “findings” and experiences during her many expeditions around the world she states,  “It was my good fortune that I was able to work in world music before people had changed so much--for example, throughout Africa while villages where still purely African villages, in Vietnam while it was still Indochina and people had time to sing. A great deal of political history has been made in the last thirty-five years and much that was beautiful in the tribal lore has now been lost” (1968:5). We can start to  appreciate Boulton’s approach and the mindset that she  had during her travels. She seemed to be trapped in the frame associated with “world music”. For example, the fact that she is interested in static cultures is troubling to me. Oftentimes early ethnomusicologists would associate Indigenous cultures with words such as “folk”, “static”, “old,” and far from the “modern.” In reality, the concept of “modernization” is colonial impacts and was a method that settlers often used to demonstrate  their power and enforce assimilation of Indigenous peoples.

Boulton undertook her first expedition to Central Africa in 1929, where she recorded and filmed both music and instruments that seemed “ethnic” to her. She utilized documentation methods such as the phonograph, photography, film and the collection of instruments from all around the world, enabling her to gather a collection of music materials from 40 expeditions in a range of more than a million miles, so the New York Times claimed in her obituary. After her death in 1980, Alfred E. Clark, a writer for the New York Times, wrote an obituary that stated, “Dr. Boulton had been to the Arctic and the Himalayas and had made expeditions to Central Africa that included stops at the headwaters of the Nile and the mountains of the Moon in Uganda. She traveled by Jeep, car, camel, truck, elephant, donkey, and even by ostrich, to record primitive people in sound and film” (1980: 1). Boulton and her contemporaries often utilized language which elevated her position in comparison to the people whose music she was collecting and disseminating.

Though the New York Times obituary cited a PhD from Chicago, Robert McMillan states, “Her Chicago Ph.D. announced in The New York Times obituary was never granted for graduate level research” (1991: 70) . The press and her contemporaries often celebrated her findings as a form of valuable knowledge from which scholars could elaborate on in the future. On June 14, 1962, a contract was filed giving Columbia University ownership over The Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Exotic Music. After Boulton’s death in 1980, she granted her trust to the Indiana University in Bloomington, accompanied by an endowment and royalty rights to her commercial publications of The Laura Boulton Foundation. In addition, it was in 1982 that Indiana and the Library of Congress were granted permission to provide public access to her collection for scholarly interests, while Columbia maintains ownership over these materials.