Laura Theresa Boulton, 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.

The language that Laura T. Boulton selected to use  in her personal notes, and book publications often times “othered” the communities that she briefly engaged with. Boulton claims that she recorded more than 30,000 music related material during her expeditions. These expeditions ranged from multiple countries in the continent of Africa to Indigenous communities from the United States, Canada, and all around the world. The brevity of these trips in each location created a lot of issues due to the poor level of engagement that she had with people which she then discussed and elaborated on in her book, The Music Hunter. Boulton homogenized a vast variety of countries and musics, labeling them as “Africa”, “The East”, “Indians of Our South West”, and “The First Mexicans”, among other made up labels. For example, it came to my attention that it was 20 years after she undertook her many expeditions when Boulton decided to label the recorded materials. Robin Gray, a scholar who is  Ts’msyen, wrote a case study on the repatriation of Ts’msyen materials trapped in her digital Collection and Columbia’s archives, and included a quote that clarifies Boulton’s approach: “The metadata was inadequate, with curious titles like “Indian Song” and scant descriptions like “Folk Song.” Instinctively I knew that our songs had suffered the same fate as most forms of captured Indigenous cultural heritage: they were collected, copyrighted, poorly documented, disseminated, and archived, “in a ‘vacuum’ apart from the proper cultural setting” (Gii-dahl-guud-sliiaay 1995:194 cited in Gray 2018:6). This practice of labeling can serve as a vehicle for creating  misconceptions about a variety of communities, allowing the dissemination of wrong information through her writings and collections. While ethnomusicologists who were contemporaries of Boulton were trying to move away from the colonialist practices of collecting, Boulton’s race, gender, and monetary power enabled her to mislabel, exotify, and spread incorrect knowledge publicly. Many of the communities which she “engaged” with are now working towards the repatriation of the materials she “hunted.” Most of these materials’ rights are reserved by major educational institutions that were mentioned above, not the people who made the music or descendants of those people. The repatriation of these materials, then, are dependent on copyright laws that may not follow the ethics dictated by these communities. 

Moreover, because many of the materials that  Laura T. Boulton collected were mislabeled and completely removed from their original purpose and meaning, contemporary ethnomusicologist,  such as Aaron A. Fox, the head of Columbia’s Ethnomusicology Department and curator of Boulton’s Archives states, “The Laura Boulton Collection is a useless mess” adding, “The diversity of Boulton’s sources, representing hundreds of different performers, cultural traditions, communities, and languages of which Boulton’s knowledge was uniformly superficial at best, further hinders assessment of the collection as a scholarly or public resource” (2013:521). On the other hand, we can still encounter contemporary collectors, such as Mickey Hart, who in his book, Songcatchers: in Search of the World's Music (2003), grants Laura Boulton a chapter in which he thanks what he calls “early collectors” for enabling contemporaries to continue her legacy.

Now, the question is: “What should we do now in terms of these materials?” Let’s take a moment and reflect on the number of cultures and stories trapped in these archives. Many of these materials were part of sacred repertoire, and are embedded with stories and oral histories of many peoples and communities. As Fox stated, these materials are useless in regard to scholarly purposes, yet they retain cultural and personal value for the descendants of the hundreds of people that Boulton recorded. Today we encounter scholars such as the cultural geographer, Chie Sakakibara who is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at Oberlin College and works on the Community-Partnered Iñupiaq Music Heritage Repatriation Project and Robin R. R. Gray, Ts’msyen and Mikisew Cree, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, who worked on a repatriation project of Ts’msyen materials trapped in the Laura Boulton Collection, along with  other scholars who are thoroughly working towards ethical methods of repatriation in regards to their specific communities. We also encounter many descendants, such as those from the famous Navajo medicine man, Pablo Wellito, who are using these materials to trace their heritage and identity. The materials collected by Boulton belong to a wide range of communities and lands and require a great deal of caution and attention in order to move towards ethical forms of repatriation.