TABLE OF CONTENTS

Descriptive Summary

Biographical Note

Collection Overview

Restrictions

Online Catalog Headings

Related Material

Administrative Information

Detailed Description of the Collection

Series I: Writings, 1943-1995

Series II: Subject area, research and correspondence, 1946-1996

Series III: Correspondence, 1940-1996

Series IV: Personal History, 1941-1996

Series V: Susan McAllester, 1944-1994

Series VI: Photo Album, c1894

Guide to the David McAllester Papers, 1940 - 1996

Biographical Note

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.

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Collection Overview

The David McAllester collection documents McAllester's interests in writing, research, music and ritual. Early folders in Series I: Writings, feature short stories and poetry which he submitted for consideration to magazines like The New Yorker. David McAllester also published widely, in scholarly journals, book reviews, encyclopedias of music, and materials for teachers. Drafts of his work and correspondence relating to his writings are contained in Series I.

The bulk of David McAllester's professional life consisted of his long tenure at Wesleyan University. Series II contains field notes and an exhaustive correspondence with colleagues in the fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology. Professor McAllester had close relationships with members of the Navajo Nation whom he worked with during field research. He was interested in the ceremonies of the Navajo people, and did extensive work on the Blessingway healing ceremony. He also had close ties to members of the academic world who either acted as a mentor to him, such as Lee Wyman, or whom he mentored, such as Charlotte Frisbie. His field work was an attempt to understand the differences and find the commonalities between people through music and ritual.

The circle of people in his life expanded ever outward and he kept in touch by voluminous letter writing as evidenced in Series III, Correspondence. This series contains both professional and personal letters since David McAllester never clearly drew the line between the two. In all of his correspondence, he kept carbons of letters he wrote, so the collection is easy to follow and rich in detail.

As a young man at the beginning of his career, his studies in anthropology at Columbia were interrupted by World War II. Documents in the beginning of Series IV, Personal History, show his application for Conscientious Objector status and the activities he was involved in during the four years he was in the Civilian Public Service (CPS). Projects of interest to him after formal retirement in 1986 are found in the second half of this series. His writing and administrative talents were put to use for the Monterey News, a local newspaper, for ten years. His humanism shows itself again in his involvement with the Never Again Campaign, a project between the US and Japan to promote understanding and the prevention of the use of nuclear weapons.

David McAllester was married to his wife Susan from 1940 until her death in 1996. Series V contains letters she wrote to him, correspondence of her own with friends, and papers surrounding her final illness.

Series VI consists of a photograph album, circa 1894 from the family of David McAllester's mother, Maude Helen Park McAllester. The photographs are portraits of family members, individually and in groups. Some are labeled with names. They are mostly tintypes.

Collection Arrangement

Series I: Writings, 1943-1995

Series II: Subject area, research and correspondence, 1946-1996

Series III: Correspondence, 1940-1996

Series IV: Personal history, 1941-1996

Series V: Susan McAllester, 1944-1994

Series VI: Photo album, circa 1894

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Restrictions

Access Restrictions

none

Copyright Notice

All rights reside with the creator. For permission to reproduce or publish please contact Special Collections and Archives staff.

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Related Material

World Music Archives at Wesleyan University has many recordings made by David McAllester. Listening copies are available although a few recordings require Professor McAllester's permission for listening.

World Music Archives also has approximately six linear feet of transcriptions of chants and field notes, un-cataloged.

Blessingway film (3 reels), in Special Collections & Archives. Access restricted. Please contact SC&A staff for information.

Books removed from the David McAllester Papers to be cataloged separately:

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Online Catalog Headings

These and related materials may be found under the following headings in online catalogs.

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Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

David McAllester Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA.

Acquisitions Information

Collection donated by David McAllester of Monterey, MA, May 3, 2002.

Processing Information

Processed by Jennifer Miglus, graduate student in Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, December 2005. Correspondence files arranged by Debi Schwartz (Wesleyan class of 2007), December 2005.

Encoded by Jennifer Miglus, March 2006

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Detailed Description of the Collection