Laura Boulton

Laura Boulton/Tuareg singer

Laura Boulton, a socialite from Ohio (b. 1899, Conneaut, died in 1980), had a 50-year long career in ethnomusicology that started with a trip to Africa in 1929. She recorded more than 30,000 songs travelling throughout the world. She saw herself as a song catcher, doing the noble work of preserving the music of vanishing cultures, that she, like most other early ethnomusicologists, considered primitive. Her legacy, despite the colonial attitude, is the preservation of musical traditions now extinct. She was not only an early practitioner in the world of ethnomusicology, she did so as a woman. (Not many women recorded in the field in the early years. One notable exception is Frances Densmore, whose known for her work with Native American tribes is well known. Densmore started much earlier than Boulton and is also less colonial in her attitudes.) I've painted Laura Boulton four times now, three tracks from the LP African Music recorded in the 1930s made it into the 2021 list. The fourth track in the top 100 (at #2) is the Girl's Game from the LP The Eskimos of Hudson Bay and Alaska in the 1940s during the Second World War. She considered the Eskimo recordings "the most primitive in her collection" and therefore "unusually interesting." I've written about this painting earlier as it was the first painting I created for the current series of 100. I'm reproducing the painting here again because I've altered it quite a bit. I have all paintings in the series hanging on my studio wall and every time I see something in an older painting I don't like I fix it. The individual paintings aren't considered finished until the whole series is finished and exhibited. I did not change the figures much in the painting but adapted the rest to fit an evolved concept for the series as a whole.

Baker Lake Eskimo/Laura Boulton

The Folkways LP African Music [1957] was recorded in the 1930s and originally released as a set of six 78 rpm records on Victor in 1939. The recordings were made mostly in the French Sudan (now Mali) and also includes recordings from Cameroon, Nigeria, and Benin. The three tracks in the Top are War Song by Malinke people recorded in Bamako, Mali, a track with short outtakes from different songs sang by Tuaregs recorded in Timbuktu also in Mali, and Orphan's Wail by a Bakwiri singer from southern Cameroon. The painting up top illustrates the Tuareg recordings, a track that includes a lullaby, a herding song, and a marriage song. I used a photo taken in Timbuktu, from the record sleeve for the Tuareg singer. It is the only photo of the four that was not taken by Boulton as she also appears herself in the same photo. That image of Boulton I had already used for the image illustrating the Bakwari singer on Orphan's Wail. Boulton doesn't name the singer but she did photograph him in the process of recording.

Bakwari singer/Laura Boulton

The third track then from African Music is the War Song performed by Malinke people on harps and drums. The image of the Malinke harpist was again taken by Boulton during the recording. It's one of most fascinating drum rhythms I've ever heard.

Laura Boulton/Malinke harpist