David McAllester papers

David Park McAllester was born in 1916, the youngest of four children. He grew up in Everett, Massachusetts, where he often accompanied his mother on natural history walks as she collected material for her weekly column in the Boston Sunday Herald. Professor McAllester traces his ultimate career as a specialist in Native American culture to an early exposure to reading animal tracks in the snow as well as to the literature of Ernest Thompson Seton, Bret Harte, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau. He was also musical; he sang as a boy soprano beginning around the age of eight and attended private voice lessons with the original intention of becoming a professional singer.

David McAllester attended Harvard University, entering in 1934 and graduating in 1938. There he continued his dual interests in anthropology and music. He took classes in southwestern ethnology and linguistics with Clyde Kluckhohn and sang as a soloist with the Harvard Glee Club. Music led him to his future wife, Susan Watkins, during a joint performance with the Radcliffe Choral Society. After graduating from Harvard, he started at Juilliard; however, he continued to do field work during the summers at an archaeological dig at the Lindenmeier site in Colorado, an activity he had started while at Harvard. He also started taking classes at Columbia University, notably George Herzog's "Primitive Music" class. By the spring of 1940 he had made the decision not to pursue music as a career and had started in the PhD program in anthropology at Columbia with a focus on American Indian music. In the summer of 1940 he joined a linguistic field study of the Comanche in Oklahoma where he did research on peyote songs and rituals. With the war looming, he and Susan were married in September 1940. He spent academic year 1940-1941 at Columbia where he met such luminaries as Franz Boaz and Margaret Mead.

Although not raised in the Quaker tradition, David McAllester had deeply felt pacifist beliefs and joined the 15th Street Meeting of the Society of Friends while living in New York City. With the entry of the United States into World War II he filed for, and was granted, conscientious objector status. He spent the next two years working with the Civilian Public Service (CPS) in a forestry camp in Cooperstown, NY, and the following two years working with the CPS at the Connecticut State Hospital in Middletown, CT.

When the war ended in 1945 he returned to Columbia where he began work on his dissertation on peyote songs. He had a part-time job in the Archive of Primitive Music there and supplemented this with adjunct teaching at Brooklyn College. He was awarded his PhD from Columbia University in 1950. In 1947 he was invited to join the faculty at Wesleyan University where he remained until his retirement in 1986.

Professor McAllester has been active in the development of the field of Ethnomusicology. When he first came to Wesleyan he had a joint appointment in Psychology and Biology. In 1952, at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Philadelphia, he was introduced to Alan Merriam by Willard Rhodes of Columbia University. These three joined forces with Charles Seeger to create a newsletter focused on ethnomusicology, first published in December 1953. The four men founded the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1955. David McAllester broadened the music curriculum at Wesleyan to include non-European music in 1956 with his course Music 31, Ethnic and Folk Music. The World Music Archives at Wesleyan University developed out of the field recordings of Native American ceremonies that he made in the 1940s and '50s, and it was partly his influence that led to the establishment of the department of Anthropology at Wesleyan in 1967. He was appointed professor of Anthropology and Music in 1972.

Professor McAllester traveled extensively during the course of his professional career. He received a Guggenheim grant in 1957 and spent a year in Arizona studying the Navajo Blessingway ritual. In 1960 he was Carnegie visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. In 1972 he spent a sabbatical visiting Japan, Indonesia, India and Finland. In 1978 he taught as a visiting scholar at the University of Queensland, Australia, as a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Award. His recordings of Comanche and Navajo music led to the establishment of the World Music Archives at Wesleyan University in 1953. This has grown extensively since then with contributions by Professor McAllester and his colleagues.

Beginning in 1979, Professor McAllester taught one full semester per year at Wesleyan, spending the remaining eight months at his home in the Berkshires. He retired fully in 1986. Since then he has continued to be involved in the Society for Ethnomusicology, writing professional book reviews, and has been very involved in his local newspaper.